Air (or Have Not Have)

'Excuse me, I am hearing sounds of distress. Do wish me to call for help?'

The hand slapped Mae again, even harder.

Mae fought with words. 'You slapped a body. Whose body?'

The thing howled in terror and struck Mae's face again and again. Left hand, right hand, left hand, beating her about the face.

Mae pushed: 'You're sick, you're old, you're mad, you're crazy!'

The thing stumbled, wounded and disorientated. 'I don't know! I don't know-ho!-ho!' The thing wailed in complete despair

'You can't remember, you're senile, you're dead! You're dead and senile and sick; you have no hands; you have no eyes; you are nowhere; you do not exist!'

'Let me go!' The thing heaved with sobs. It could no longer speak, for grief and despair and horror. Its voice rose to a despairing shriek, and it picked Mae up and flung her across the desk.

And like the passing of a tornado, suddenly everything was still.

Mae was left panting, alone in Mr Tunch's office.

'Do you need me to call for help?' the desk asked.

'No,' Mae was able to croak. Her throat was raw from shouting. She had been speaking for both of them.

Tears and spit were smeared all over her face and splattered over the desktop. The cheeks and the palms of her hands stung. She sat up and looked at her own reflection in the glass-topped desk. A fresh bruise was coming up on her cheek.

Suspicion made Mae look up, and she saw a camera in the corner of the room. Tunch will have seen all that, she thought. He'll have been spying.

Well, if he's seen all that, then that's all he's going to get from me.

Mae pulled in deep, shuddering breaths. She stood up and wiped her face and tried to straighten her hair.

I've seen her off. I know how to see her off and I don't need Mr Tunch.

Time, she thought, to get down to work.

'Continue with lecture,' she told the desk.

Mr Tunch joined her for lunch.

'I thought you might like to try the new food,' he said.

Because of her lecture, Mae knew what that meant. New proteins, new tastes, grown from new organisms.

'They are designed to be delicious,' he said.

The soup was bracing and solid, like lentils laced with lemon, and made hearty with something like tomatoes and pork. It was sour and sweet, with a bitter undertow like coffee.

'You see?' he said, chuckling. 'Good, isn't it?'

'Yes,' Mae had to admit. 'Yes. I wonder if I will be happy to go back to cold rice?'

He laughed again, and said. 'Maybe you won't have to.'

I am, in part, a Question Map for his future.

'You are experimenting on me,' she told Tunch, coldly.

'The food is specially formulated for expectant mothers,' he told her. 'Its nutrients pass within seconds into the bloodstream through any tissue layer. In effect, it is being digested the moment it enters the mouth.'

'Does that mean it's shit by the time I've swallowed it?'.

Mr Tunch only chuckled. He touched Mae's bruised face. 'Mae. We're trying to help you.'

For a moment, she almost believed him.

In the afternoon Fatimah led Mae to what looked like a flying saucer. Mae lay down in it, and again, there was no physical pain. Fatimah clucked once with her tongue. She turned the scan off, helped Mae down.

'What, what?' Mae said.

'The child,' said Fatimah, dazed. 'The pregnancy is in your stomach.'

Mae blinked. In Karz, the words belly or womb and stomach could be confused.

'Your food belly,' said Fatimah.

How? Mae knew what she knew. That was not possible. 'Your machine is wrong,' she said.

'No chance,' said Fatimah. 'Here.'

She replayed the file of the sounding. The screen showed a shifting mass of what looked like translucent grey porridge. Shapes seemed to bubble out of it.

Pumping and alive, something sighed and shrugged inside her. Fleetingly Mae even saw something like a head.

'That's the child. It has grown the usual protective sac, and appears to be healthy for now.' Fatimah turned back and looked at her. The downward slope of her head crumpled her chin and neck and made her look older, sad-fleshed, like Mae. 'It is in your stomach.'

'So how could it happen?' Mae's voice was raised.

Fatimah's deep-brown eyes kept staring down into hers, as if to offer her a stable place. 'Pregnancies can take root anywhere in the body, once the egg has been kissed. The question is, how would an egg and the male part meet in your stomach?'

And Mae knew how. 'Ilahe Illallah,' she gasped, though nominally a Buddhist, and covered her mouth. She had swallowed Ken; she had swallowed her own menstrual blood. She felt like a flurry of scarves, all fears and horrors. She was stripped and bare, her sexuality exposed, her private secret bedroom found to have one wall missing. The whole village could look in. Scientists peered over Mr Ken's shoulder, prying into her strange habits.

'Has this ever happened before?' Mae whispered.

Fatimah shrugged. 'If it has, it would miscarry by now.'

'What will happen?' Mae was following the consequences of this monstrosity. Birth through the throat? Surgery?

'The child cannot be healthy,' said Fatimah. 'As for birth, it should be by surgery, but I cannot recommend that. We… We can help you quietly, telling no one…' Her voice trailed away, a warm hand on Mae's chilled arm.

In the raw villages of Karzistan, unwanted winter babies were left to crystallize in the snows. Third daughters were whisked away and dispatched before the mother could see them and love them.

Fatimah seemed alarmed by something. Her voice was still low. 'There can be no question of your keeping it.'

Mae felt as though she were clutching a cloth over herself to hide naked breasts.

If the village knew this, what would they do? She was already a monster for simply falling out of marriage. A woman who talked too much and then gave birth to a monster through her mouth? They might drive her away with stones.

'You must understand. The stomach is full of strong acid. To dissolve food? We don't know what that will do to the child.'

Mae was seeing Mr Ken's face. Her young man… Young? Either one of them?

Yes, at heart they were young. At heart and in memory, they would always be in school together, longing and shy. They would always be the lovers who found each other late in life.

That heart and memory would only be as real as long as they lived. But if there were a child, that meant that love would outlive both of them.

And that was what love was for, all the waste and the pain and the inconvenience and the awkwardness and the ugliness. It was to draw together and build an island of love, in which children could grow, and love can be passed on.

'Mae? Mae you cannot be thinking…'

Mae was thinking of redemption. In Karz the phrase for it was 'Unexpected Flower.' It was seen as late Indian summer, surprising the world with roses. My Unexpected Flower, she called the child. The machines were silent