IDEAS FOR STORIES
Part of a dialogue, catching New York Accent: "Hi, how OAR ya?"
1. While showering, the washcloth encounters a built-up smell in the buttocks, and in a day or two there's blood back there. I figure it's just a strangely delayed aftermath to screwing, but then it shows up again just BEFORE I get fucked, and I'm puzzled about it, and then when it shows up a third time, I decide to see if it's following any kind of cycle, and I'm flabbergasted to see that it follows a 28-day cycle, and I'm compelled to think that it's some sort of menstrual cycle. There are no signs of anything beside blood, except that, now that I know it's monthly, I begin getting headaches and sweats and hot flashes during those times, undoubtedly mentally caused, but there it is. Read a magazine article about a hysterical pregnancy, and then I'm fucked soundly and for a couple of months I don't have any bloodiness, and I don't think of anything until I'm beginning to get dizzy in the morning, I feel terrible, and when some married couple talks to me about the wife's pregnancy, it turns out that I have the symptoms of pregnancy! I try to convince myself it's only hysterical, but the feelings I have are hard to quell, and I find myself getting short of breath, there's an increasing sensation that's unpleasant in my stomach, and I'm beginning to think I'm having a child. Completely terrified to tell anyone about it, and go to some of the plays about men having babies, but am convinced that they just didn't realize how serious it would really BE! Could have a rather melodramatic end as I'm sitting on the john one day, with a bad case of constipation, and there's a terribly hard bowel movement which causes a great deal of pain, and I look back into the toilet bowl and there's a mass of blood and a huge turd which in my madness I take as a fetus, and I've spontaneously aborted! Wander about in my increasing lunacy, and I have periods again, though seen through the fog of lunacy, and then when I'm fucked again, and the periods stop again, the last scene is the conversation between the admissions officers in an asylum, saying imagine that I committed myself to the best obstetrics clinic in town, saying that I didn't want to lose my second child, and how they committed me there over my terrible protests, deciding I'd really gone around the bend, but the reader has no CLUE if it's real or madness (except millions of years of history of male sterility).
2. A Doctor of Obstetrics handles a pregnancy that goes beyond term without trouble to the mother, and the mother tells how much EASIER this child is to care for than the others: doesn't cry much, is bigger, sleeps better, is even beginning to be toilet-trainable as he wets a certain length of time after a meal, etc. This happens again and he begins to do research on the long-term pregnancies, and finds that slight improvements are the norm. Then there's a case of accident, and he's able to rescue the fetus and keep it in a makeshift womb, but it dies because he hasn't made the right preparations. He makes elaborate preparations to construct an artificial womb, waits around for the proper baby, and then transfers it to his keeping. Months pass and the baby grows and its brainwaves get stronger and one day he comes back to find its eyes open, looking at him. The placenta has worn thin and transparent, and a random motion of the baby's arm tears it, and the child continues to grow in the womb, and there are "changes" which the doctor notices but isn't specific about, tending to rationalize what he sees. For the rest of the story, the tale is told from the viewpoint of the doctor's friends, who are worried about his preoccupation with his work, though they don't know what it is. Finally his best friend persuades him to talk, and the doctor consents to show his masterpiece, and the friend is issued into a horror of an apparition that has pure white eyes, long hair, claws for fingernails, hands that clench and unclench like monstrous traps, a body wrinkled and white from constant immersion in liquid, mouth opening and closing to reveal longer than usual teeth, and brain waves that bear no resemblance to human thoughts. It never sleeps, dissects anything which is thrown into the womb, and the umbilicus has grown larger. It had been a male, but the sexual apparatus has atrophied, rather than developed normally. The friend is horrified, but the doctor assures him that this started out a normal fetus, there was nothing unusual about it, thus ALL babies would show similar development, and it's only our prejudices that term it a monster. The friend doesn't see this, breaks into the laboratory later and takes the child from the womb, but it refuses to be born, and bleeds to death when the umbilicus is cut, but the friend doesn't have the evidence to commit the doctor, and he knows that somehow, someday, the doctor will continue his experiments.