DOCTORS AND NURSES: THE BIRTHING PROCESS.


(You don’t need to read the original Doctors and Nurses to understand this one, neither does this follow on from the original, the characters and narrative style are just the same)

       When you finally come around it’s dark. And wet. The last thing you remember is plucking a splinter from the old wooden fence out your ass, Kink giggling manically; a blonde troll among the bovine shadows.
       You came down to the farm the night before. An educational retreat Kink told her father- who’s asleep upstairs in the separate cottage, half a mile down the way. Finding yourselves. Making your peace with nature she told him.
        A fanfucktastic rave she told you.
        Kink. She’s been coming down here every other weekend for as long as she can recall. Longer in fact she tells you.
        In this time she’s accumulated an impressive stock of excitement, hidden damply among the hay bales.
        That first night you crack open a bottle of something and wash it down with another. That first night Kink hands you the sheep-sheers and claps her hands gleefully as you hack away at the candyfloss curls rolling down her spine. That first night you strip away your clothes and roll around with the swine. You run through fields of waist high corn, shrieking long into the bruised dawn.

         But this. This is different. You call for Kink and something warm and gluttonous swims against your lips. You ponder this as you realise with slow fear that your air supply is not as it should be. In fact you’re only a little way from suffocation. You thrash out in this warm moist darkness and find your space is limited. You are constricted. Living inside this warm black tube.
          Your fingers walk and dance over the strange, slippery surface, trying to navigate their way toward some sort of solid purchase. Some clue as to what has happened. You try for Kink again, and as you open your mouth you suddenly notice the smell. The reek. The festering odour of sour flesh creeps its way into your nose and lingers hotly in your brain. Oddly you think;
          Womb.
          Frightened now you kick out and cry, sickly jelly coating you, seeping under your fingernails, moistening your crevasses. And as you begin to think this is some perverted dream, as your mind dulls with lack of oxygen, you hear a voice.
          Kink.
          Her voice is oddly muffled and you turn your face blindly towards the sound.
Don’t worry she tells you. Calm down she tells you. Chill the fuck out she tells you.
She giggles high and mutters low and suddenly a cold sweat prickles over your body. Kink. That bitch.
         Push she tells you. You can do it she tells you.
         For lack of understanding and choice you comply, thrashing and straining harder than before. Between your hands, near your left breast you feel an irregularity in your dripping cocoon. A puckered grin with thin, rough teeth. Stitches.
         The realisation washes over you slowly. You’ve been sewn inside. Knitted into this… this…thing. You suddenly develop an acute case of claustrophobia. Your face is smeared with stinking gore and you are suddenly in no doubt that your temporary shell, your rotten cell, is something deceased. Something dead.
         You scream for Kink. You scream your throat dry until you have no voice left and eventually you get the response of soft laughter on the other side of the fleshy wall.
         Just push she tells you.
         You run your hand along the smile of stitches and shove. You feel the walls around you stretch sickeningly until finally there’s a wet ripping noise and a pinpoint of light appears at your chest.
          Desperately you ram your hand through and enlarge the opening, rough heavy-duty stitches chaffing your wrist, fingernails scraping congealed fur.
          A loud whoop penetrates the growing slit as Kink observes your thin white fingers groping savagely in the dark.
          You join your liberated hand with your warm wet one, gaining a slippery grip on either side of the scarred flesh and ripping downwards. You grunt at the exertion of your labours, and slowly, slowly you feel the resistance diminish as stitch by stitch breaks loose and your head is birthed through the jagged mouth of skin.
          You take in a breath of sweet air, your face smeared with red viscera; purple with night. Your hair is a knotted mess of gore hanging down your naked back. A dreadful, skeletal foetus- slick with innards- stepping uncertainly out into the world.
          You free yourself from the decaying carcass; your foot brushing against udders whose milk has long since dried up and turned sour. You lurch forwards, arms outstretched in newborn bewilderment and something cool and delicate is placed into your sticky hand.
          You eye the glass of pink champagne for an eternity, your head swimming, before knocking it smoothly down your throat, swallowing the sweet frothing liquid down with a newly discovered thirst.
          You turn your blood encrusted face to Kink who stands patiently at your side, the champagne bottle upturned against cherry-pink lips. You inhale greedily and scream. You shriek out a torrent of abuse, shaking your matted head at her.
Kink smiles slowly, and points over to the open carcass behind you.
          Kink. She tells you how she planned this last weekend. She tells you you’ll never get her back this good. She asks you how it feels to be born again. She shows you her deft handy-work with the stitches left unbroken. She walks you back to the house and hoses you down with ice cold water, hand on her hip; a look of mild disgust across her young face as she watches you crouch naked in the dirt and wash yourself clean of her tricks.
          She hands you a towel.
          She tells you to put some damn clothes on before her dad sees you.
          She yawns and bids you goodnight, leaving you standing naked on the dirt path running through the corn field; a black silhouette in front of a sun already bleeding its way through the darkness.