“Jack, pleeeaase! I don’t want to sleep on the couch tonight,” flew from Melodie Carpenter’s seduction-red lips like a verbal canary from its tracheal cage. Her shining eyes pierced in her husband’s direction from their living room. Her face, a tragicomic porcelain mask, stretched smooth. Spilt inkwell hair ran in loose ribbons on either side of her face as her skeleton hand brought a shaky cigarette to her red-hot lips long enough for her pretty little throat and lungs to pull a drag, exaggerating her clavicles, then brought it away in a wisp of smoke. Her legs wisped away like the smoke did.

            “Why not?” Jack called from the kitchen, half-listening, fixing another drink. His voice grew as he approached. “It’s so comfortable—we can crack the windows to let the crisp October breeze in and pass out to the sounds of an old horror flick and the warmth of each other.” He entered the room. “Before long it’ll be too cold and we’ll wish we could do this.”

            He knew the last part was a lie before he said it; even when winter fell and constricted them for half a year, even as brittle and ruthless as Western New York winters were, they would still wrap up in a million blankets and cozy-up by the fireplace. And no matter what, no matter where, even if all else failed, Jack Carpenter always had the warmth of his whiskey—his best and most dependable friend.

            “Do you ever listen when I talk?” Melodie used the question mark as a period—bold, underlined even. If my husband doesn’t listen to me, who does? she thought. There was an entire spectrum of men and women who appreciated her, who would bow at her feet and wait on her every whim—maybe wave her with an elephant leaf, poolside. Especially when she darkened the freckle under her left eye with a dot of eyeliner and wore her vintage cat-eye Ray Bans which made her look oh-so-sassy.

            Why stay with Jack? She had her reasons:

            He was brilliant. He was the head of the science department at the local university, the youngest of whom the school ever granted the title. His intelligence made her knees weak—the way he understood things she could not affected her in ways she couldn’t understand. She wanted to climb inside his brain and camp out for a week, come back and tell him all the wonderful things he already knew. He dreamt huge, gigantic, large enough to blot out the sun—yet realized it took infinite minuscule steps to get there, and that sunshine was not always to be blotted out. He was funny at the right times, serious at others, and could make her laugh or cry in an instant. He was more than talk—he was life in motion—and she was in love with the ride, even if at times she struggled to keep up.

            When these things failed to captivate her (as rare as that was), when she felt disheartened and disenchanted, it was his physical features which drew her back in. His sharp cheek bones, his messy dirty-blonde hair and rough 5 o’clock stubble, the bluish-purple fireworks bursting out from his eyes into the world. He was thin but strong. Her attraction blistered beyond hope.

            He was a god to her, and she, a goddess to him—though his religion lacked practice and his knees stayed uncalloused and clean.

            “Of course I listen to you.” Jack approached his wife as if she were a desert mirage come to false fruition. “What’s wrong, baby?”

            “I told you this morning, Jack.”

            “I know, baby—of course I know. Your nightmare… what was it again?”

            “Jack!” Melodie’s face opened-up like a letter slipped into the cell of an anxious inmate. “How can’t you remember? I am sick of repeating myself to you—I shouldn’t have to! Especially about things that are important. I told you how much it bothered me…”

            “All right, baby, just calm down—”

            “Don’t tell me to calm down,” she hissed, nearly rattled.

            “Ok, ok, don’t calm down,” he threw his free hand up in universal surrender positioning, the other gripping his drink, ice cubes whispering sweet nothings to the glass cocoon they waded in. “Do whatever you like, baby. But, please, sit down. Tell me about your dream. It was something about a… a… a baby?”

            “…yes…”

            “Well? What, did it juggle flaming butcher knives on a pewter unicycle?” She couldn’t suppress her smirk. She cleaned it up quick, but not before he noticed. “Come on, Mel, I want to hear.”

            Melodie sunk like a seed into the earth tones of their living room. She sipped her drink and lit a new cigarette. Looking around, she searched for a focal point. She looked at him, then down. At Jack, then away again.

            “We came in from the theatre and lay down here on the couch. We talked and cuddled, the television a dim murmur in the background. Before long, you passed out, like always.” She stared at him like an honorable mention of a white marble Rushmore. “I flipped through the channels for hours while you snored. Finally, I fell asleep.”

            “…and?”

            “And it was horrible, Jack! It was excruciating, disturbing, repulsive! It was so, so awful…”

            Jack moved close and wrapped his arm around her. “Tell me, baby.” She threw his arm off like it was on fire and moved away like he was radioactive.

            It took her a moment. She squeezed her eyelids tight. Her face was twisted rope, churning this way and that; her mouth and nose were that of a rabbit, twitching about; then everything relaxed like a waist freed from a corset. Jack could tell she was reliving whatever dreadful series of events she had experienced the night before.

            “We lived in a little house by the railroad tracks,” she began. “The tracks ran through our backyard and the trains passed at a ridiculous rate—every twenty minutes or so—blaring their horns behind our home each time they passed. It was… cartoonish.

            “Inside the house was just like ours, and it began with last night, only I fell asleep when you did. What felt like weeks passed, and when I woke-up I was pregnant. You questioned if I were cheating on you, you were afraid of being a father. It was so vivid, Jack. I saw spit flying from your teeth as you yelled and screamed and… pushed me down the stairs. I cried myself to sleep on this couch—this very couch—and dreamt I were somewhere else, someone else. Another time, another place. It was grand.”

            She sipped her drink and dragged her cigarette. Jack lit a smoke and did the same. He looked on with narrowed eyes. She continued.

            “When I woke up—in the nightmare—I was as big as a bass drum. My water broke. You smiled and held my hand as we sped to the hospital. You were the sweetest thing. Then you kicked me out of the car at the front door and sped off, leaving me covered in dirt. I bobbled and swayed inside, collapsing in the lobby.

            “Coming to, dim lights flickered over me. I was on my back being wheeled through the hospital halls, only the walls weren’t white like hospital walls should be. They were blood-red and looked damp, they glistened. I reached out to touch one, it was sticky and stained my fingers red. The woman pushing the gurney, her face hidden, impossible to identify under a bone-white surgeon’s mask and bone-white scrubs, ordered, ‘Do not touch the walls, ma’am! They’ve just been freshly painted!’ I didn’t smell fresh paint but I did smell something metallic, like blood. You know that metallic smell.”

            Their eyes met, old lovers after years of no correspondence. Jack nodded.

            “She left me in a pitch-black room, nothing in sight aside from the bed I lay upon. One bright light shone down on me, like I was a performer on a stage. The room appeared endless, as if I were floating through space. I was alone. Pain set in. Hours passed.”

            She cleared her throat. She did not drag her cigarette or sip her drink. She collected herself like a lovelorn child, like how a professor of geology might gather stones on a vacant beach. It was overcast. Blue-gray smoke rose all around her.

            “My insides tore themselves apart. My body pulled and ruptured and ripped. I twitched and squirmed and screamed but no one—nobody, no animal, no god—heard me. If they did, they didn’t care.”

            Jack cringed. Melodie stared out into nothing.

            “The bones in my pelvis crunched and cracked as it… it came out of me. Came through me. Left my body and became its own entity. Grasping the bed handles until they bent, my entire body burning and floating, a leg popped out… then another… then another. I screamed and screamed until I threw my voice out and could only make open-ended, hoarse, whooping sounds. I couldn’t breathe.”

            “…my God,” whispered Jack.

            “Once the thing escaped me, you came in drinking a bottle of whiskey, followed by doctors disguised in bone-white masks and clothing like the woman who pushed me down the hall. The thing I gave birth to bit through the umbilical cord and jumped into your arms. The doctors scribbled fiercely on notepads. You glared into my eyes, swigged the bottle, beamed at our… our… child… then glared back at me. You said, ‘Thanks a lot, babe.’ Then I woke up.”

            Silence suffocated the room. The air was wet concrete. Melodie swelled with tears. Jack stood up, ran a hand through his hair, exhaled a deep breath he seemed to have held for years. Within his chest he found the courage to speak like one might find a forgotten family heirloom in a dusty attic.

            “Listen,” he said, brow furrowed, searching for the right words, for any words, pacing about, “you know that will never happen, Mel. You know I would never do any of that to you. I am sickened by my dream-being you’ve encountered. Disgusted. And you know we will never have a mutant baby. I mean, we won’t be having kids for a looong time, Love. We finally own a home; we are finally getting our lives in order. As bothersome as your nightmare is, it’s not real. Baby, we’re—”

            “Jack,” Melodie said, her voice a quivering icicle, “it scared me so bad I bought a pregnancy test this morning.”

            The icicle loosened.

            “One at first, then three more,” she told him.

            Silence suffocated. Wet concrete.

            “Jack…”

            The icicle let go. It fell, sharp and thick. Where it landed, no one could be certain.

            “Jack… I’m pregnant.”

*                      *                      *

            Throughout the pregnancy, Jack pushed Melodie’s nightmare from front-center of her subconscious theatre down somewhere deep underneath the metaphysical floorboards from which it came. He quit smoking and drinking along with her and they spent no more nights on the couch. Every time she thought she had him figured out he turned around with a cool washcloth in one hand and a back massage in the other. Every time she felt scared and alone he appeared by her side, reading a book on baby names, stroking her swollen head and belly. Caressing her psyche. Melodie never felt so in love.

            A week before their baby boy was born they chose a name: Tyson. Meaning high-spirited, just like them.

            Jack did not accuse Melodie of cheating nor did he yell or scream or throw her down a single stair. When Melodie went into labor he drove her to the hospital and did not kick her out in the dirt nor did he speed off. He rushed her into a wheelchair and the nurse who raced her down the hallways did not wear a bone-white surgeon’s mask nor bone-white scrubs. The walls were bone-white, matching the room Melodie landed in, filled with beds, curtains, soon-to-be-mothers and -fathers, doctors and nurses, medical equipment of all sorts beeping and whirring and flashing. There, Melodie prepared to perform the oldest miracle humankind has ever known. There, next to the newest technologies humankind has ever created.

            Tyson came quick but was far from painless. The pain was almost identical to what Melodie felt in her nightmare, intensified tenfold by reality. Jack stayed by her side, hands going from white to numb to purple. He and Melodie threw their voices out like blown amplifiers, like poorly thrown boomerangs, screaming at each other and Tyson and no one.

            “Here he—”

            The doctor stopped.

            “Oh, my,” he said, his face dropping from smile to scowl. Triumphant to troubled. Victorious to vexed. “How did we miss this…?”

            “What is it?!” wheezed Jack. “What the hell is it?!”

            Melodie, swimming in her senses, drowning in her consciousness, gasping for air, heard the doctor say, “You better take a look, dad.”

            She saw the vague shape of her husband hitting the floor.

            She passed out when he did.

*                      *                      *

            Over the next day and a half Melodie experienced blurred visions of what went on around her, like an old black and white film reel stitched together frame by frame:

i.

            The delivering doctor shared words with an RN pertaining to how he felt the situation had been handled.

            “You hung me out to dry, Alice—I should have your job for this. Why wouldn’t you warn me beforehand?”

            “Dr. Sam, I didn’t—I didn’t know. We didn’t know. No one was aware—”

            “Save it. Keep your mouth shut like you did before…” and on and on and on.

ii.

            Melodie heard voices outside the door.

            “Jack, Jack, it’s going to be ok. It will be all right,” said her sister.

            “No, it won’t be ok, it will not be all right. Did you see him? Did you? Don’t tell me what’s going to be ok and all right…” and on and on and on.

iii.

            Melodie felt the warm weight of something small and soft on her chest, under the blankets. She saw a thin layer of peach fuzz on a little lightbulb of a head.

            A redhead! she thought. No wonder Jack’s upset, he has always disliked redheads.

            Using all her energy Melodie began lifting the covers. The metal rain sound of the curtains yanked back startled the sheets out of her hands before she saw the rest of her new baby boy.

            “I’m sorry,” said a woman with a name tag reading ‘Alice.’ “Didn’t mean to startle you. Time for another shot of morphine is all. It may help with what’s under the covers.”

            “What do you mean?” said Melodie. “He’s just a redhead. Why is everyone making it out to be so bad? I know they have the highest percentage of neanderthal DNA but I don’t care about that, it doesn’t mean a thing. I am sure he’ll be a very smart boy. Jack doesn’t, but I love redheads.”

            Alice administered the medication. “Oh, honey. No, no. That’s not it at all.” She left with another flash of metal rain.

            The drugs took hold; Melodie was a rubber giant, an inflated goon. She half-coordinated her mile-long arms to lift the blankets, peeling them back. Her baby clung to her chest like a sack of parasitic potatoes, like hot apple oatmeal. Her eyes shot down to his legs—he had two of them and they looked fine. Her eyes slid up his body—slowly, slowly—and she saw what was causing all the ruckus.

            What caused Jack to faint and scream at her sister. What caused the doctor to lose his professionalism. What caused a morphine-wielding RN called Alice to issue an ambiguous warning to a new mother. What curved Melodie’s lips up in a sweet mama smile because she was so high.

            She giggled.

            Tyson had two left arms and none right.

            I guess that old saying is true, she thought. ‘Two lefts don’t make a right.’

            She wasn’t wrong. Not one bit.

iv.

            Jack came in screaming his head off.

            This time she didn’t wake up.