Raw Deal

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Thank God my mother doesn’t shock easily. When I knock on her door at about 8:00 in the morning, she wordlessly enfolds me in her arms and pulls me into our house. I burst into grateful tears, comforted both by her touch and her scent. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed both until this moment.

“Katherine Anne Malloy,” she hisses in my ear, her voice shaking with emotion, “where in the Seven Hells have you been?”

Hell Number Eight, I quip, but don’t say it aloud, because I know it’s not entirely true.

“You won’t believe me, Mama,” I tell her in a small voice. I hardly believe me.

Her piercing blue eyes search my face, and then push me to arms’ length so she can scan the rest of my body. “Come sit in the kitchen. I’ll fix some coffee and we can talk,” she says, meaningfully.

Oh, God, she knows something is up.

She putters around our cozy kitchen for a few minutes before setting a steaming mug of strong black coffee in front of me. I pick it up gratefully, having not had coffee to drink in about a year and half.

“Where is the baby?” she asks, casually, causing me to spray coffee all over her spotless table.

She wipes up the mess without comment while awaiting my response.

I decide to delay the inevitable by replying with a question of my own. “How did you know?”

She smiles gently at me with more tolerance than she probably thinks I deserve. “Most women’s bodies change when they have a baby. If all you were was pregnant, why did the military tell us you were dead?”

There’s just no help for it. “I was kidnapped by aliens,” I blurt out, feeling absurd.

My mother dissolves into peels of laughter, until she realizes I’m not laughing with her. “You’re serious, Kat?”

I nod, because there is suddenly a lump in my throat. “My son is about eight months old now. He’s with his father, light years from here,” I choke out, tears scoring my cheeks.

“Oh, Kat,” she sympathizes, stroking the back of my hand across the table. “Why did they return you without him?”

I never knew telling the truth could be so hard. “He’s not like me, Mama. I couldn’t raise him here.”

Slowly, haltingly, I describe the Yautja to her. The more I talk, the paler she gets. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” she suggests.

The last thing I need to tell her is the hardest of all. “I’m pregnant again.”

“Oh my God,” she whispers, looking lost, which strikes fear in my soul.

“I don’t want the military to take me,” I plead. “They’ll lock me up and study me for the rest of my life. They’ll hurt my baby.”

My mother’s face tightens thoughtfully, then assumes a reassuring determination I’ve known her to possess all my life. “We can’t have that, now can we?”

When she takes both my hands in hers, I know it’s going to be okay.

******

At least this time, I know the drill. Fortunately for me, my Aunt Helen is an obstetrician. She’s able to work us in just after lunch. My mother swears her to secrecy, which isn’t easy after my aunt sees my blood work. My numbers tell her I should be dying, but her eyes and instincts say I’m a healthy young pregnant woman. After asking me innumerable questions about how my last pregnancy went, she starts me on megadoses of vitamins immediately and suggests I eat six meals a day. I should have no problem doing that. I already feel like I have a tapeworm.

My sisters are a tougher sell. Newly adult Erin and our youngest sister, Jen, are thrilled to see me when they get home from school. We cry a lot of tears, but they get uncomfortable when Mama tells them they can’t tell anybody I’m here.

“Are you in trouble?” Jen asks, her younger version of our mother’s eyes round with concern.

“Only if the military finds out about me.”

“You’re AWOL, then?” demands Erin, shoving a troublesome bang behind one ear. “Why did you let us go all those months without a word? Why did they tell us you were dead?”

“Because they didn’t know what else to tell you. I disappeared from some kind of secret military complex, right under their noses.”

Of course, then they wanted to know how I did that. When I tell them, they both glare at me in disbelief.

“You can’t be fucking serious!” Jen finally erupts, earning her a sharp reprimand from Mama.

No matter what I say, they simply refuse to accept it. Finally, Mama makes the mistake of mentioning Aunt Helen’s findings when she tested my blood. She doesn’t tell them I’m pregnant, but they both know what Aunt Helen does for a living and make the leap instantly.

“You’re pregnant by an alien!” they exclaim in unison.

I nod, not sure what else to say.

I know what Jen’s going to ask by her lascivious expression. “So what was he like in bed?”

“Jennifer Lynn Malloy!” Mama shouts at her. “You don’t know how she got pregnant and you don’t need to know!”

“Yes, I do,” she replies, gleefully, because I can’t keep the blush from crawling up my face.

My mother knows when to cut her losses. “Well, never you mind. The important thing is that Kat is home and it’s up to us to keep her safe. To do that, the two of you must keep your mouths shut.”

“Does this mean we can’t have friends over?” Erin’s question is an almost whine and makes me want to slug her.

She has a point, however. When I still lived at home, there was a steady stream of teenagers in and out of our house. Girls frequently slept over on the weekends. I doubt that stopped just because I moved out.

“Maybe I should go stay with Aunt Helen,” I suggest, quietly, even though I hate the thought of leaving my family so soon after reuniting with them.

“Not a decision I’m going to make today,” my mother insists. “Today, I want to enjoy that you’re finally home.”

******

The first time Aunt Helen does an ultrasound on me, I ask Mama to be there. I figure it's best to deal with the shock of what her second grandchild—the first one she'll get to see—is going to look like when he's born. Although our ultrasound doesn't have the color or clarity of the one Rah’chond used on me, they can still see well enough to gasp.

"What's wrong with the face?" Mama asks, subdued.

I know this is going to be hard. "Nothing. It looks like its father’s people. Only they grow to be eight feet tall."

Both women's eyes dart at me, and then at each other. "You must have been terrified," my mother opins, her voice full of imagined dread on my behalf.

"I was," I admit, remembering when I first met Chak'tou. "I thought I was dead."

Aunt Helen sounds less protective, angrier. "But he raped you instead?"

I'm twenty-one years old, an adult, but I still find talking about sex with the two most important women in my life remarkably uncomfortable. "We made a deal," I weasel, because while I consented to save my life, I can't say I didn't enjoy what happened once I did.

"How is that even possible?" Mama asks in wonder, studying the fetus with more interest and less horror.

"I told you her blood isn't like ours anymore," her sister reminds her.

"The baby's less different than it seems," I insist. "He—or she--will cry and suckle and sleep just like other babies. He'll purr when he's happy, though." Suddenly, I'm in tears. "I miss Nhaw'che."

"So stubborn," my mother scolds, gently, while I cry buckets into her shoulder. "I wondered how you could hold it in for so long. I'd have been beside myself if I had been parted from any of my babies."

"I have talked about him some," I sniffle, defensively.

"As if he was somebody else 's child. You hadn't even told us his name. As if that could keep the pain away."

Even more buckets flow forth, as all my pent up loss and sadness comes out. Seeing my new baby makes me ache for his brother. And their father.

******

We all try hard to make it work. At first, being home is enjoyable, but trying to manage Erin and Jen’s social lives around the need to hide me makes us all snappish and unhappy in short order. It quickly becomes apparent that I’ll be better off at my aunt’s house. Ten years older than Mama, Aunt Helen’s sons are grown and gone and she’s been divorced for as long as I can remember. Not only that, but she lives a half an hour away, out in the country on a secluded property where I could actually go outside without fear of being seen.

Since Helen works long hours, I have lots of time to putter around. Her house is huge and beautifully appointed. The two cats she owns are thrilled with my presence, because I’m someone who can pet them and fuss over them. They soon follow me and sit in my lap anytime I sit down. I watch many of the movies I missed in the last year and a half, plus hours of mindless television, before finally abandoning that for Aunt Helen’s stocked bookcases. Sometimes, I simply go outside and walk the perimeter of her property, savoring the sun on my face and the wind in my hair.

Often, I cook, because after a brief period of morning sickness, my appetite returns with a vengeance. I stroke the swell of my belly and wonder how Nhaw’che is doing, what he looks like now. Yautja children grow so quickly he could be running around by now. Although my milk has long since dried up, my heart still hurts almost as much as the day I left him. I wonder if I’ll ever see him again, if he’ll ever meet his sibling, now growing inside me.

I try not to think about Chak’tou at all, but he visits me at night. When I can’t sleep, I remember his breath in my hair, his tongue tasting my skin and his magnificent cock buried deep inside me. No matter how much I remind myself that he killed my team and raped me, human rules of conduct don’t seem to apply now that I’ve been changed by a shot of his blood, and he has fathered my two children. I long for him in the dark, my most sensitive flesh tight with blood and desire. I miss him on a level that defies all logic and reason. It’s not what humans call love, but something more primitive, more carnal. He is my mate.

Aunt Helen isn’t a nosey person, but she knows I’m deeply disturbed and is perceptive enough to guess why. When she broaches the subject, I completely miss her meaning at first.

“You miss him, don’t you?” she asks one evening, after we’ve had dinner and are sipping sweet tea on her veranda.

“Terribly. I’d give anything to hold him again.”

“I don’t mean your son,” she clarifies, pointedly.

I bite my lower lip, feeling embarrassed. How do you talk about missing an alien lover everybody else would consider ugly as sin? I settle for nodding, unable to meet her eyes.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought. I don’t think you can help it,” she opins.

I look at her sharply. “What?”

“Your blood chemistry has been altered to the point where I don’t think you could become pregnant with a human child anymore. It only makes sense you would find a male who can make you pregnant more attractive. That’s how biology works. Does he have a name?”

I haven’t spoken his name since arriving home. “Chak’tou,” I say, and smile, like an idiot. “Relationships don’t work among his people like they do among ours.”

I find myself telling Aunt Helen all of it, all about the Yautja and all about my time among them. It feels good to finally share the craziness that has been my life since the fateful day Chak’tou and my team first met.

She purses her lips thoughtfully. “It can’t have been easy for you, coming from a culture that values monogamy and frowns on people who sleep around, especially women.”

I have to agree. “Among the Yautja, everybody sleeps around. You can’t help it. But among their females, pregnancy results pretty quickly. The urge to mate goes away. For me, it never goes away entirely. I always smell like I’m in heat. Males assume you want them when you smell like that. Even when you think you don’t, it doesn’t seem to take much coaxing from them before you do.

“It’s not that I can attract their males that the Clan Mothers took issue with, it’s that I can do it outside of a normal heat cycle. At times, I can be the only receptive female. There are three heat cycles a year; they last about a month each. That means I’d need to be locked up away from contact with males all the rest of the time. They didn’t see how I could raise a child under those conditions.”

“Males would fight over who gets to mate with you,” she translates correctly.

“Yeah. They saw it as a needless waste of good males, because some of them would die fighting over me.”

“They sound like very practical women,” Aunt Helen admits.

“They should be. They run everything.”

She breaks into a huge grin at that. “If only humans were that sensible!” Right after that, she sobers. “You better hope your child is a female.”

I picture my growing baby as a huge adolescent boy and my heart sinks. One newly sexually mature Yautja male on a planet full of females that smell too good. What am I going to do? And in that moment, I admit to myself what I’ve always known, even though the baby refused to let us see its goodies. I’m having another son.

******

I weather this pregnancy much better than the first one. I actually stay pregnant for almost thirty-six weeks this time, despite my huge size. When I start having contractions, Aunt Helen sneaks me into her clinic after hours, where she has all her equipment and a sterile room. Unlike the Yaujta, she has performed a thousand C-sections and is expert at it. She gets the baby out with minimal blood loss. I get to see some of my blood, which fascinates me. It’s closer to yellow than red now. It’s no wonder it gives lab test result numbers that should be toxic.

Helen lays my new son on my chest. I welcome him and hold him close. He purrs while I cry happy tears. She stitches me up, but I can tell by the sounds she’s making that there is something unusual about it.

“What is it?” I hazard.

“You’ve almost stopped bleeding, all by yourself. I know you told me you had a C-section last time, but I could barely locate a scar. Now I know why. Your healing ability is remarkable. I was worried about how we were going to move you out of here so soon after surgery, but I don’t think it’s going to be a problem now.”

My mother, who gets squeamish at the sight of blood, is waiting just outside. When Helen has finished cleaning me and herself up, she goes to get her sister. She approaches my bed cautiously, not sure what she’s about to see. The baby has, by this time, started what’ll be a very regular hunt for sustenance. Despite the pain it brings me, it feels good to have him at my breast. His purr swells as he begins to draw milk.

“He sounds like a cat,” Mama murmurs in wonderment.

I smile at her, trying as much as possible to act as if having an alien’s baby is a normal, everyday occurrence. “I told you.”

She draws closer, her eyes never leaving him. I’m stroking his skull while he nurses. He’s warm and solid and mine. This child is a paler green than his brother, but it’s still not a skin color ever seen on a baby from this planet.

“He’s green. And so big,” Mama says, unable to keep from stating the obvious.

Eventually, she reaches my shoulder, where she can see his face. “You can touch him,” I encourage, knowing this can’t be easy for her. “He won’t bite you.”

Helen slides up next to her, taking her elbow in sisterly support. Helen, bless her, has done enough ultrasounds on me that my son’s appearance isn’t as much of a shock to her. Tentatively, my mother reaches out to touch his little, clawed hand. I don’t know why, but he releases my nipple and turns to look at her, his golden eyes wide. At her gasp, he coos at her.

“Don’t tell me he’s beautiful,” I quip, needing to break the ice.

Both women laugh, releasing some of the tension in the room. I switch the baby to my other nipple. Since this is first milk, there won’t be much of it, but enough to satisfy even this big a newborn until my regular milk comes in.

“He can suckle with that mouth?” my mother asks.

“Quite well,” I assure her. “You won’t believe how fast he’ll grow.”

She reaches tentative fingers towards one of his lower mandibles, which he wiggles towards her touch. “They move!” she jerks back her hand, startled, but I have to remind myself she’s never seen a Yautja before.

“Yautja use them to express emotion and to communicate. Mandibles can tell you a lot once you know how to read them. It’s a sign of affection to babies and small children when you touch them.”

Resolutely, Mama strokes one of my son’s mandibles, causing his purr to intensify. She smiles acceptingly at him. I feel immense relief, because I didn’t want my mother to reject my child. I need her support desperately.

“Your sisters may not react so well,” she warns, sounding reassuringly like an ally.

“Well, it’s not like I’m gonna stick them with babysitting,” I retort. “They can deal.”

“What are you going to name him?”

I would’ve liked to have named him something Yautja, but I know few Yautja names. I’ve been mulling over names for months and have come to no hard conclusions. However, the time for procrastinating is over now that he’s here. While I’m contemplating, he finishes nursing and turns to earnestly study my face, as much as his newborn eyes will allow.

“Is there an Irish name for gold?”

******

So my second son winds up with the unlikely name of Boyd. It’s short, sweet and serves the purpose. I actually get to see what a Yautja baby turns into this time. I find it amazing that as deadly as the adult males can be, little Yautja boys are incredibly affectionate. Boyd adores being hugged and cuddled and played with. My sisters, once they get over the shock of his appearance, spoil him rotten.

A lot of things are the same as they would be for a human boy, but some are different. Boyd has to be taught how to handle his claws so he isn’t always scratching us. His lower face, with its folds of skin, has to be meticulously cleaned, especially after his teeth start to come in. And he doesn’t like it, anymore than most young humans like to get their teeth brushed. His need for meat is much greater than ours is, and it doesn’t matter to him if it’s cooked. We have to teach him not to try to eat Aunt Helen’s cats, who are convinced, once he starts walking, that Boyd must be the Antichrist. Perhaps the greatest challenge is making him constantly aware of how strong he is, so he can learn how to control himself before he hurts, maybe even kills, one of us by accident.

Because nobody ever tells Boyd his mouth shouldn't be able to form English words, he learns how to speak recognizable English. While it takes him longer to master than it would a human child and some of the consonants won’t ever be quite right, he can make himself perfectly understood. He sucks up knowledge like a sponge, learning how to read as he learns how to talk. For the first four years or so, raising him isn't all that hard, despite his differences. It gets a lot harder when he starts realizing how truly different he is.

"How come I don't look like you?" he asks, morosely, for the thousandth time since his fourth birthday. "Why am I green? People're not green; frogs are green."

"Your father wasn't from around here," I finally tell him, at last giving it up.

"Smithfield?" Boyd wonders, perplexed.

"No, Earth. He wasn't from this planet."

He ponders this in his little boy brain and tries a different tack, eyeing me with undisguised suspicion. "Was he green, too?"

I picture Chak'tou, in all his towering glory. "Not exactly the same color, but yes. Spots like yours, too."

Boyd tightens his mandibles for a moment, and I know he's unhappy. "I want to go to school," he announces, to my shock.

We've all been oh so careful about what he gets to see on TV. We don't let him watch shows or movies or read books about everyday life, hoping to forestall this as long as possible. "Where did you get that from?" I probe.

His deep set eyes cut away from mine, and I know he's been doing something he's not supposed to. "I found a book. At the top of the bookcase. Kids like me go to school in it. I wanna play with other kids, Mama. Boys."

I knew this day would come, and now that it has, I have no idea what to do about it. Boyd's whole world has been Aunt Helen's house and my immediate family. He’s had no interaction with anyone who isn't female, no one younger than a teenager. We haven't dared, terrified somebody would tell the authorities about his appearance, and they would take him away from us. Since giving birth, I haven't left Aunt Helen's house, either, because I'm afraid of what the military would do if they knew I was still alive. Boyd and I have existed on our own little secluded island, happy until now. How do I tell my little son why his life can never be like everyone else's?

I've often wondered how Chak'tou could leave me here pregnant. Considering he knew immediately when I became pregnant with Nhaw'che, he had to have known it’d happened again. Maybe my agony at being forcibly separated from Nhaw'che had gotten to him on the trip here. After all, he had lots of children on Yaut and a son of ours to remember me by. Perhaps he knew what Aunt Helen suspected, that I couldn't have children with a human male anymore. Maybe he left me this child to ease my loneliness, but it would've been better if he hadn't. Or if they'd just let me stay on Yaut instead.

Sure, I'd've spent a lot of time being fucked by strange males, but at least I'd have both my sons living with me on a planet where green isn't an unusual skin color. And I'd get three months a year where I could be outside in the world like a normal person, not subject to either pregnancy or random mating. That's a lot more months than I get here. I'm still mulling over what to say to Boyd when Jen bursts into the room, waving a newspaper in her hand.

"I don't know how it happened, but we've been found out!" she cries, nearly hysterical.

There, on the cover of one those fantastical gossip rags, you know the ones, is a blurry photograph of my youngest son. It looks like he was out in the backyard at the time. ALIENS LIVE AMONG US! blares the headline, ironically truthful for once. That's not the only truthful part. It names our state and everything. Doubtless the only reason their hack reporters haven't shown up on our front porch yet is because whoever took that picture is holding out for more money.

"Hey! That's me!" Boyd chirps, cheering up as he recognizes himself.

"Yeah," I sigh, seeing our whole future turn from murky grey to solid black. "I'm afraid it is."