Content Warning: Child 13 contains themes including pregnancy, infant mortality, child abuse, abortion, and cannibalism. Please be aware of these topics before reading, and proceed only if you feel comfortable engaging with this material.
The first one didn’t taste how I expected it to. Perhaps because I ate it raw. It was only a small one, still unformed. I’d expected it to taste sweet like honey. I thought it would slide down my throat like an oyster, gelatinous and smooth. But it was firm, tough, and tasted of death. It was delicious.
The thought of being skinny has always repulsed me. I never want to look down and see toned muscles, or my hip bones pushing through my skin. In fact, I never want to see my hip bones again. I want my stomach to be eternally distended. I want it to protrude from me like a fleshy Fabergé egg, so huge that I can’t see below it. I want to trace my finger down a permanent linea nigra and feel new life growing under my taut skin. I’ve never wanted the love of a man, only that of a newly-born child. Nothing satisfies me more than the desperate craving for devotion I feel from a baby suckling my breast.
My appetite for childbirth has never been satiated. The thought of a man inside me is disgusting, so I pay for vials of sperm to impregnate me. It isn’t always successful, but I’ve still pushed twelve babies through my cervix, each one tearing me with a wonderful agony that I want to experience over and over again. But nature denies me. My womb is dry and hollow. My eggs rotted. My uterus collapsed. I tried so hard to fight it; to ignore the night sweats, the thinning hair and the violent tears. But my blood dried up.
I am barren.
The others have passed the age of needing me. Number 12 no longer allows me to feed it. My nipples are hardened reminders of the love I once had. I need them inside me again. Grown up, they are no use to me. I have no interest. I’m starving for the love of another baby. Twelve will never be enough.
There’s a clinic in the neighbouring town, a place where women go to exterminate the life inside them. The dead are thrown into mass graves and burnt. I’ve seen them do it. I used to drive down there every day and watch from my car. I’d witness monsters in blue scrubs nonchalantly throw wasted lives into yellow plastic coffins, leaving them to rot before the weekly incineration. I couldn’t bear to see them abandoned. I wanted them all for my own. So I took them.
“Are you going to get us food, Mummy?” Number 9 asked. I slapped it across the face, “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that?” I can’t stand that word: Mum; Mama; Mummy. As soon as they refuse my breast, they lose the right to have me as their Mother; our bond is broken. If they’re old enough to wash their hands or climb on a chair, they’re old enough to fend for themselves. I slammed the front door, blocking out its sobs as I heard Number 4 yelling after me, “ You fucking, mental bitch!” I locked the door. They can all rot. The precious foetuses in those yellow bins can’t, though. I mustn’t let them.
I drove to the clinic and parked down the road, away from the glare of the streetlights. The building was silent. At this time, the doors are always locked, and anyone left inside fester behind closed doors, wallowing in their own pathetic self-pity. I sneaked around the back of the building where the aborted are discarded. Using bolt-cutters, I opened a gap in the metal fence and pushed through it. My hands shook with excitement as I opened one of the bins; inside were dozens of small, plastic caskets. I took one out and prised it open, revealing a bloodied lump inside. It was a small one, no more than twelve weeks. I felt an overwhelming urge to have it inside me; to give it a new life within my body. I brought it to my lips and kissed it gently, before I pushed it up inside me, as far as my fingers would reach. “You’re safe in there”, I whispered.
I thought that would be enough. That it must now be reincarnated and crawling deeper into me. I thought that my womb would welcome, feed and nurture it, as it had done all my others. But it didn’t. I wept as I felt it repeatedly slide out of me. No matter how many times I willed myself to close up and keep it safe inside, it just kept coming out. I was so desperate for it to stay that I tried to sew myself shut. I crouched over a mirror and forcefully pushed a darning needle through my flesh; the pain reminded me of the times the others spilt me. But the thread kept snapping and my determination went unrewarded. Instead, I stayed awake day and night with my hands clasped vigilantly between my legs. But it didn’t work. On the third day, I lay on my soiled sheets with it resting between my thighs. I stroked it tenderly, brought it to my breast and rested my lips on it.
It was then that I knew.
I ran my tongue over it and tasted its bitter, wasted life on my lips. I pushed it into my mouth, hoping I could swallow it in one, but it was too big. The taste would be repugnant to most, but it was like ambrosia to me. I sucked it clean, bit it in two and let it slide down my throat. It was safe now. I knew it would find its way to my womb and rest there. The taste was so addictive that I knew one would never be enough; I craved more. I returned to the clinic and cleared the bins, gorging myself on the tiny, lifeless bodies.
My womb is now full of children. Soon, my stomach will bloat, my breasts will swell and my body will be thriving with desperate, new life once more.
Of that, I have no doubt.
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