Fiction: Disillusionment on the Eve of Revolt/Birth

First Trimester: Vertigo

BEING PREGNANT, UNEMPLOYED, and uninsured is like walking around with a ticking time bomb in my stomach. Everyone sees me expanding, my distended belly. The dark circles under my eyes. My puffy face. The smell of my vomit breath. Everyone congratulates me, but no one offers me a job. It must make them uncomfortable, how sad and tired I look. They demand I suffer with a beatific smile; that I, like other women, earn the gift of my burdens.

I look for a job with the people saving the planet. It seems sensible, now that I’ve committed to continuing the species. There’s a job opening with the League of Climate-Saving Mommies. For this position, all mommy leaders must have a low ego. An ego so small, so self-effacing, it emits no carbon.

My ego, unfortunately, is regular-sized. Though lately it’s been diminishing. My doc says this is all perfectly natural when growing a fetus. The body has only so much room. The lungs compress as the womb colonizes the chest cavity. The ego, nestled like a nut in the brain, shrinks into its mommy-shell. I learned a lot the one time I saw him, the doc.

Only the nurses have time for me now. They weigh me and measure me with tape like a Thanksgiving Turkey. I wish they would remove my organs, stuff them in a little baggy, and store them in my chest. If only they would admit that after the big day, my body will all be all used up; fit only for the butcher.

Unable to find a job with my extra-large belly and my medium-sized ego, I join one of the many ongoing Revolutions to stay busy. Back in college, I was big into Revolutions. Always singing, screaming, and carrying on about the Revolutions.

Nowadays all the revolutionary petitions are long. You’ve got to scroll, scroll, scroll on your phone. The sentences of the Revolutions have become passive and recursive. No one has done anything, but the system looms large and gobbles up pulsing egos in its yawning bureaucracy. Too big, too bright, too threatening, our egos are.

“Every revolt ends in tears,” my grandmother warns me on the way to my first meeting. She is from Poland or Ukraine, Russia or Hungary; somewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Even she can’t say for sure because the borders are always changing. Like a Wikipedia article that’s constantly being updated, the land rewrites itself in blood and politics. You wake up in one country and go to sleep in another.

She pronounces my name as a series of vvvvs. She insists that the only good government is steady, corrupt, but familiar like the face of an aging spouse. “It’s dangerous,” she says, joining a Revolution when you’re pregnant. “Who will insure you against miscarriages of justice and disillusionment? Who will help you nest?”

I sign up anyway. I believe in all of it, well, most of it—ok, some of it. It must be necessary or carrying a child wouldn’t be so costly, so painful, so desperate. The Revolution promises me free daycare, affordable housing, access to education, equal pay, no more debts, clean air—the works.

Seeing my last name, the Revolutionaries are suspicious about my ties to Israel. No zionists allowed. Self-determination, nationhood… these things are well and good for other minorities, but not Jews. But, I’m a Good Jew, I explain. I’m nothing if not meek with my bump straining the seams of my Jersey shirt-dress. I even tell them about my grandmother. They like foreigners.

Second Trimester: Revolt

HAND-IN-HAND WITH THE other Revolutionaries, I organize. A process that involves a great number of Meetings and no discernible structure except Feelings. Everyone must bring their Feelings and sort through them like smelly socks. Only the smelliest socks count.

For the Revolution, I try on new identities like party hats and place my sexuality into tiny gift boxes, labeled packages of thorough and perverse self-knowledge. My Instagram is a bouquet of foreign sympathies. My grandmother says I have compassion for everyone but myself.

We Revolutionaries are like kids playing with an Ouija board. We swear no one is in charge. Yet, somehow someone deceptively moves the needle to form a message. It takes days, hours, months to get a consensus. I flatten myself into a thin line of democratic power. Without bias and entirely directionless like a spinning top.

If only I could break free of my neurotic individual ego and its rude intolerances. If only I could dissolve completely into the pure essence of anti-capitalist, inclusive, carbon-free thinking, wheeling out over the atmosphere into a clear blue sky—no borders, no microaggressions, no inequalities, no pollutants—free to roam bodiless over the dead constructs of colonial nations, immersed fully in a unified, shared consciousness. If only the stack of ObGyn bills weren’t piling up on the kitchen counter. If only I didn’t feel little resentments building up inside. Whisperings of discontent like kicks in my belly.

The nursery theme is “forest animals.” I paint my place Woodland Green, but my apartment still looks like a graveyard of sagging Ikea furniture. Everything is missing a piece. The Revolutionaries buy me reusable diapers and dumpster-dive for onesies. They want me to name my baby after the disused and the righteous. They suggest names like Public Education and Trees.

Across the street, the fascists move with beautiful synchronicity like dancers. They are fast and vicious. I pretend not to lust after their efficiency. My comrades tell me that we must redouble our efforts to appear leaderless like a fungi with many white-capped heads. I can see the egos of the fascists from a distance, brightening at the top like flowers, releasing all that nasty carbon into the air. They must be childless!

The fascists have reduced all policies to six words, so we must cut ours down to five. We spill out keywords in a game of liberal magnetic poetry. Liberation. Equality. Justice. Hope. Power. The fascists are spouting hate about the globalists; but we are raising our fists up against the elitists, which is entirely different. I pretend to understand this because I am afraid that when the baby comes I will have no friends.

Around me, the nation splinters into two like a Jekyll and Hyde. The monster of politics ravages the country, but all I really want is paid maternity leave and an end to the bad weather. The seasons are out of sync as my body painfully grows. Each centimeter of stretched skin is a silent scream. My feet flatten; the arches melting into the unsteady Earth.

The costs are rising quicker than the temperature. The bills make me throw up long past the first trimester. My overstretched ligaments remind me there is a fee for everything. My credit and pelvic floor collapse, leaving me breathless and carrying around my bladder in my purse.

At the clinic, the nurse asks if it’s the hormones that are causing these bad feelings. She offers me Prozac from an enormous drawer in her office, as if mental illness were a personal contagion, set apart from the tipping axis of the planet. They say the Earth has lost so much groundwater that its axis has shifted; I am often dizzy.

The nurse warns that the antidepressants come with side effects. Certain patients can’t have orgasms and stop voting altogether. But it’s worth it, she says if it helps get me through motherhood. Like prayer, it’s just a matter of what I can swallow first thing in the morning. I have to have faith in the generic; I can’t afford the name-brand.

The nurse instructs me to stretch out my different identities like shadows to get the right dosage of serotonin and sympathy. Not too much sympathy, that’s how Karens are born. Like the Revolution, I can be angry about anything outside myself, but personal pain has to be swallowed up by public displays of rebellious joy. Like concrete, I soak up the many pollutants in the air. All the rage I’ve had since becoming a mother becomes trapped in rock and buried at the bottom of my ocean. I trot my identities out carefully, like show ponies.

I only get sadder.

My grandmother insists that my misery is just as natural as the pregnancy. “Only Americans expect to be happy.” All my life my grandmother has dyed her hair blonde. She recommends skipping the pills and going straight to disguise.

I tell the nurse I can’t take any more, but they don’t let you refuse things at the mommy clinic. It’s rude. And the pain is only getting worse.

Still clinging to the Revolutions, I demand better treatment. I get rude. I want to see a doctor, I say. Once I make a demand it’s hard to stop. The complaints bubble up into a volcano of kvetching. I demand more—of my doctors, my ex-bosses, my Comrades. The egotist, the won’t shut-up Jew, the hag with Golda Meir’s nose, hanging off my face like a pimpled beak—I demand more! Call your manager! Call the President! Call the bank and the UN! Insure me! Employ me! Educate my child! Reduce carbon emissions! Let me lead! I want to throw out the smelly socks of your Feelings! Let me criticize!

The nurse faints. The other clinic patients run from me, screaming. The last obstetrician in America quits. The President does not return my calls. He turns away, embarrassed for me. All the Job Creators blacklist me, laughing at my swollen breasts. The local University commissions an exhaustive five-year report on the contributing factors of my ongoing collapse. The UN calls me an unfit mother and cancels my whole pregnancy everywhere except inside my aching womb. All the daycares explode creating craters full of puppies in need of rescue. My Revolutionary comrades rush to get in line and adopt them. With the daycares gone, all mommies must stay at home and work for free at mothering. Soon I will be one of them.

In my last revolutionary meeting, whiteness unhinges its jaw and drags me into its toothy maw as punishment for my personal complaints. I am uninvited to the pluralist lecture series. It turns out I am one of those elitist Jews. Partiless, revolutionless, lost—like my grandmother, I am rendered nationless. I am consumed by a series of vitriolic tweets. Only my bulbous physical body remains.

My ego is, at last, gone.

Third Trimester: Burning

IT IS ALMOST a relief to have disappeared inside my placenta. I am nothing but a closet full of wrap-dresses and muumuus. A chrysalis for a newer, more innocent ego. A child that does not yet have a name.

Outside my lonely apartment is the smell of burning. I slip on a mask to keep the ash out. It’s hard to breathe. The baby pushes my lungs to the tippy-top of my chest. Faraway in another country a fire is eating an old forest. The stones of the ancient temples are shaking. The Tree of Life burns. The sky turns dark in the middle of the afternoon. My neighbors keep their kids out of the yard. The parks turn empty. This is why people told me not to have children.

Only my grandmother stands by me, clucking her tongue. She instructed me to have three children: One to replace me, one to replace my husband, and one to replace someone who died in the Holocaust. She tells me to name them all Gorgeous.

It’s too late to argue the morality of adding a new life to the chaos of a dying planet. I am having a baby or it is having me. He may be the last of our line, the last of our People, the last of our species. The sonogram shows an impossible dodo twisting inside the gray moonscape of my uterus.

Right now I am one body and two people, as riotous and angry as the polarized nation, doomed to squabble over the finite resources of an indivisible body.

Diana Fenves is a speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in Planet Scumm and Walter magazine.