Fertile by René Bennett

Fertile

by René Bennett

  “Breed me!”

“Yeah? You want my seed?”

“Yes sir, give it to me.” A glistening ornament of saliva unspools from his slack lower lip, pooling in the dip of my clavicle in the shape of a shooting star, or a cell in meiosis. I feel beautiful.

  “Good boy. I’m gonna fill you up with my load.”

“I want it, I want your load.”

“You’re a good boy for daddy?”

“Yes, daddy, make me yours.”

“And this is daddy’s hole?”

“It’s your hole, daddy. Fill me up.”

  “You want me to impregnate you?”

“Yes, please. Please, please. I want your babies, daddy. Give me all your sperm. Fertilize me.”

As the Grindr hookup sinks deeper against my body, I deliberate on the impossibility of desire’s object, which, in the very fact of it being desired, becomes concretized, crystalline, like the iridescent crest of a Portuguese man o’ war emerging, singular, from the teeming sea, which is to say, in other words, that it becomes possible. By wanting what cannot be, I create its possibility, whether it’s realized or not. Isn’t all desire, then, to imagine new limits to what’s possible? We make each other fly. Give it to me.

  “Oh my God, I’m gonna cum.”

  Afterwards, I thank him for breeding me and then get in the driver’s seat with his semen still inside my intestine. On the drive home, I become an ocean. With the car in autodrive, my body is rhythmic and limitless, full and fluttering.

  The sky freezes as the other car appears in the frame of my windshield. Briefly, I catch a glimpse of two silhouettes in the driver and passenger seats, a man and woman--the man locks eyes with me at the moment that our two vehicles collide and in the immediacy of his pupils I see life flowing through the eye of a needle and then our gazes are thrown into the uproar of metal screeching, glass shattering, engines exploding, the whole world accelerated into a spasmodic supernova as the dashboard crushes into my chest; I feel the cum leak out of my body, miscarried in the collision; I am breathless and alive; God appears fleetingly as a smudge of blood on the windshield in the shape of a comet, or a cell in meiosis. A shard of glass has pierced through my chest: Cupid’s arrow shot straight into my heart.

When I text my Starbucks manager telling him I’ll be unable to work, for medical
reasons, he asks for proof. I send him a picture of myself in the hospital bed with a neck brace and bandages swaddling my face. He texts, Show me a doctor’s note. I tell the doctor I need a note for work. The doctor tells me try not to talk. I’m not supposed to disrupt the convalescence of my splintered jaw, or my partially collapsed lung, or my cervical fracture, or my sprained ligaments. All in all, the doctors told me, I bore the crash fairly successfully, insofar as success is a measure of human endurance.

I compulsively check Grindr, wishfully supposing that one of the hot male nurses might be looking for a lunch break fuck--not that I could provide much in the way of sexual pleasure, given the splintered jaw, collapsed lung, cervical fracture, and sprained ligaments. But the limitation exacerbates the desire. All fantasy begins at the threshold of the real. I float between parallel possibilities.

  I’ve received a message that reads: Hi looking?

  Hi. Are you at the hospital? I reply.

  Ya. Just visiting. My grandma’s on life support. So bored lol.

  I put my phone upside-down on the side table as a female nurse enters, her pale blue scrubs a near exact color match to the color of the sky, which is slowly entering the sunset phase, and she tells me I’m going to be anesthetized so they can proceed with a surgery, but that, luckily, it won’t be too invasive--luckily, my constellations have offered me their blessings. Still, I think, the misfortune of causing another’s misfortune might be greater than the weight of a car crash itself. A beautiful man in scrubs enters as the nurse says is your anesthesiologist and
they begin assembling the anesthesia circuits, which appear to me like the vessels of a postmodern heart; a tube goes into my arm. The handsome anesthesiologist says, Are you ready? and I answer, Give it to me. His face hovers above mine, as if he were about to kiss me to sleep. A delicate vapor flutters from his fingers and flows into my veins, into the imperfect symphony of my heart. My heart is like a satellite, spinning slowly through outer space, looking for the signal of another heartbeat to modulate with. The voices of the nurse and anesthesiologist refract around me--I hear them say collision, I hear them say pregnant wife. I submerge into a vision of
the man in the driver’s seat, his face illuminated with terror, with a helplessness that I want to nurse in my arms, as we swim together in the hot spring of our defenselessness. I am concocting together his agony and my guilt into a salve that will fix us; in this vision, we are each holding a pearlescent abalone in the basin of which rests a pool of transparent liquid, lightly emanating the smell of gasoline and rose petals. We lattice our elbows, put the abalone to our lips, and sip
simultaneously while holding eye contact. In an effervescent daylight, I am walking past the cathedral where his wife’s funeral is taking place. The cathedral’s spire punctures a single cloud with its silver crucifix glistening at the tip, as if leaking into the sky, and just as my eyes are drawn to the gleam of the crucifix, the front doors of the cathedral swing open, and the funeral’s cortège oozes out in a rivulet of black fabric and tears, proceeding down the front steps, beside which I stand and watch in shared solemnity. Following the cortège’s grand marshals, the sleek form of the casket emerges, and I envision the body of the pregnant wife resting within it; I wonder what they do with the fetus. Is it left inside of her womb? Do they excise it and place it next to her, or in a casket the size of a birdcage, or toss it away altogether? My deliberations are dispersed when the final set of pallbearers comes into view, and there, holding his wife’s casket with downcast eyes, I recognize the contours of his face from the windshield view, the slope of his brow, the hypotenuse of his trapezius--on cue a breeze sweeps the wavy hair which comes down just to below his earlobe, and in the effervescent daylight I can see perfectly his face, handsome and dolorous, like a red-figure portrait of grieving Orpheus painted on an Attic vase. I see his wavy locks--adrift, splayed out onto a white pillowcase, and I’m kissing his eyelids, I’m grazing my lips along his stubble. Then I move down the atlas of his body and descend upon his inner thigh and kiss it, too, and then I plunge his dick in my mouth, and I’m slowly pressing my
throat down around it as I interlock his fingers with mine and squeeze. I barely breathe, vacillating steadily between his thighs. I want to siphon the sadness out of his body. I want to cleanse us of time, so that in this rhythm we can forget all losses, enter a timeline where the car crash never happened, where he doesn’t have to bear this sorrow. I want to carry it for him, I’ll be the basin in which he can unload all of his burdens, so that we might create something that ascends past our feeble bodies, something resilient and forgiving. As the hearse drives off and
the last glimpse of his face pivots out of sight, I feel it racing unquenchably, the imperfect symphony of my heart.

  Several weeks pass. My news round-up features one story harkening to the car crash with an ethical question regarding the resurfaced doubt towards self-driving vehicles (I skim through this quickly while listless in my recovery chair), followed by a report about the progress of genome editing technology. “First Successful Fertilization with Two Fathers and No Mother” reads the headline. “We’ve come a long way since scientists first created bi-paternal mice...” In the article, I’m struck by a description of in vitro gametogenesis, in which one male’s stem cells were used to generate an egg cell and edited to duplicate its X chromosome. The male-spawned ovum then was fertilized by a sperm cell from another male, therefore creating a bi-paternal embryo, which could gestate in a surrogate. I envision the two strands of DNA finding each other, miraculously, in the plasma of the scientists’ laboratory, and connecting together like the teeth of a zipper, like holding hands. I find it beautiful that the body’s blueprint is not immobile but is always refracting itself, a knot that gradually unravels on the endless fabric of possibility. I’m delighted by the lengths that we go just to have our DNA intertwined. A bond written everlastingly into the genetic scripture.

  In the last few weeks, the name Kevin Collins punctuated the fleeting news headlines as that of the widower. I let the name unfurl over my tongue several times like tasting the flesh of a rare fruit for the first time; Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Articles customarily mentioned that he’s a manager at a locally based software company. From this information, I’m able to extract enough details to find his LinkedIn page and, henceforth, his Instagram profile. Sunken in a seabed of desire, all the world, except for his Instagram grid glaring out at me from my screen, becomes blurry and distant, consigned to the deep sea, as here, this light beams forth in my photic zone. Pictures of Kevin at a company dinner, pictures of Kevin’s kitchen in disarray, pictures of Kevin standing on mountains, pictures of Kevin by the ocean, pictures of Kevin and his pregnant wife by the ocean. I envision him having to send a bereaved message to the software company, informing them of this death, trying to temper his grief into the language of corporate acceptability, afraid to let on to the depth of his sudden emotions--maybe even caught off guard, too, by the depth of his emotions. By need more than sympathy, I open ChatGPT and try getting it to draft a direct message to send to Kevin, something halfway between heartfelt condolences and an invitation for reconciliation. I refine and reread what it’s generated, which mostly makes me feel like a pathetic, incapable faggot. Just as I’m deleting my chat, I receive a notification from Kevin’s Instagram account. He has sent me a direct message:

  Hey, sorry to bother you after everything. I was hoping you might meat me for a coffee. I’m not trying to get some kind of revenge. I just want to talk. You’re the only other one who was there who I can talk to about it. Let me know. I’m Kevin btw.

  Much more simple and graceful than the eulogy I was generating, made all the more
graceful by the spelling error, a kiss of authenticity. I answer promptly.

  On the agreed upon day of our convening, I exit an Uber to the imposition of a house in the style of what I call Connecticut Revivalism, which mixes bland suburban exteriors with a touch of modern slab and block aesthetics. Normally, this kind of design makes me want to kill myself, but today I am as exalted as the Archangel appearing over the grotto of Nazareth in a beam of light. I am inflammable like a teenager who tastes their freedom driving alone from their parents’ house for the first time into the heavenly moonlit night, even as my legs shake all the way from the car to the front door.

  When I press the doorbell, it seems to ring out infinitely into the universe, a signal in search of life, a transmission of hope. The door opens and he stands with his arm in a sling, gazing back at me in my cervical collar, a shared wave of something heavy passing through us at the instant of our convergence, with a sigh of understanding that precedes any attempt at speech we might make, knowing that what has brought us here transcends anything articulable, anything from which meaning can be derived, a force that simply moves us into place, as inexplicable as gravity.

  “So--”

“I’m sorry for--”

“I know. Let’s not--yet.”

“I understand.”

  “It’s weird.”

“Yes.”

“Seeing you now, after--”

“Yeah.”

“Well, come inside.” The home’s interior is vacuous and full of sunlight. He offers me a seat and some espresso, to which I say no, because ever since starting my job as a barista, the taste of coffee triggers wage-slave nausea in me, and he brings me a glass of water and ice with a lemon slice, instead. As he begins speaking to me, mainly about inconsequential matters of his company and car insurance, my focus is pulled into the shadowy aperture of his mouth where occasionally I see glistening that pink rose petal, the tip of the tongue. What it utters beneath the utterance of words is a beckoning, a pull; my desires are sucked into its vortex, its soft pinkness in the rough stubbled garden of his visage. And I think of the pregnant woman who while she lived must have had the same impression of this beautiful mouth, in fact I imagine her falling in love with him precisely because of this, the way his lips and tongue move when he speaks, as if he were taking the words themselves into his flesh, gliding along their contents, rimming them. This is the same mouth she kissed when he inseminated her.

  On the wave of this lingual reckoning, I interject, “Kevin, I don’t mean to cut you off, but I know there’s lots on our minds, and I want to be honest with you. I’m carrying a lot of guilt, and I’m hoping that coming here, talking to you, will help me understand this guilt, at least, and let me use it to help you.”

  “Listen,” Kevin says, his eyes hovering somewhere above my head, as if trying to make something out floating in the air. “I asked you to come here not because I’m here to put you on trial, like I said, but because there’s a lot of guilt on my end, too, which has now become something a bit different, something I’m still trying to work my head around.

  “At first, I felt extremely angry at you, and then I circled that anger back to myself, then to technology, to the world, looking for something to blame, someone to give this loss a root cause, a scapegoat. But in the past couple weeks, that anger has iterated into something different, my guilt has become more abstract. I feel this deep, persistent need; there’s so much hurt from this loss, and if I don’t try to fill it in, somehow, I’m afraid my heart will stop.” As he speaks, now, my focus has shifted from the contours of his oral anatomy to the illumination of the words themselves, their meanings landing like pellets of rain in the reservoir of my cognition.

  “I can’t even begin to imagine all of the hurt, really,” I say. “And I’m sorry for trying to make this about my guilt, when I know that what you’re going through must be so much more complicated and intense. But, I’m not totally understanding what you’re saying. You need to fill in your loss?” For a moment, I consider that he might be asking me to roleplay as his wife, which I would, if it came to it, oblige.

  “I’m hurting so much, and it’s not something I can articulate very clearly, but my body has been acting funny because of it. It’s like I’ve been possessed by a demon of grief. I’ve been engaging socially, meeting other women, I mean, but not in a serious way--not in a sense of wanting to find a new wife, I mean. I just meet these women and try to forget, for a night, try to distract from this emptiness I’m working through.”

  “If I’m being honest, Kevin, which I want to be, I’m no expert in heterosexual
relationships--hookups, if that’s what you’re describing to me--but I don’t think that’s anything to feel guilty about. I mean, we all cope in our own ways, as long as you’re not just hurting more people.”

  “Here’s the thing: it’s not just that I can link up with any woman. Of course, I was married to the woman I considered the most beautiful in the world, so what I’m attracted to will naturally resemble her. But it’s not just that. They also have to be pregnant. I can’t stop thinking about pregnant women, wanting them, wanting to be in them, to feel that presence of life in them. It’s not even about sex--I think sex could be a gateway to being as close to them as possible, though I haven’t had the opportunity to be physical with any yet. They’re the only ones who ever truly look complete. I’ve become obsessed with pregnant women.” It is these final two sentences that I hear with the exact inflection, the exact shades of pining and purple as at the moment when he uttered it, for days to come, playing in my mind at involuntary intervals. I’m transported into that funereal house, noticing, as he speaks, some of the items that were no doubt left since the car crash--a pair of woman’s heels awaiting their wearer eternally at the door, a baby carriage unpushed, a shelf of books related to child rearing, their bindings uncracked.

  When I come back to my first barista shift since the accident, I hear his voice constantly as I tend to the mortalities of daily labor. I’m in partial disbelief at having to work again at all after weeks of the utter chaos and ravaging desire of life beyond work tearing into my routine, and my mind ventures into other planes that blink through the surface of reality. I grip the grounds-filled portafilter and lock it into the group head of the espresso machine, and I sense that my hand is
maneuvering an erect penis. I see steam coming off skin, a golden-brown mat of
pubic hair, a deltoid muscle pressing against my teeth--the POS system keeps spouting out oat milk latte orders like a regurgitating bird--I want flesh in my teeth, I want to feel the twitching between my fingers, I want to be filled up, with cum, with love, with radiance, I want to give you what you want from me. My hand stings suddenly, and I realize that it’s stroking the steam wand as hot steam sprays directly onto my skin. A delayed shout escapes my throat as I abruptly withdraw my hand and spill hot milk across the counter. The middle aged woman waiting for her
lavender caramel cinnamon oat milk latte with whipped cream at the counter says, “Um, sir, are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I say, smiling back, and I hold out the latte to her with seared fingers.

  “Thank-you-so-much-have-a-nice-day,” she blurts and strides off. I tell the other barista that I’ll be right back, then I head to the storage room and cry. I take out my phone and through a blurry lamina discern on its lonely screen a Tinder notification. It’s a message from Jerome, the date who I matched with prior to the car crash but didn’t start speaking to again until just a week ago. In our chat, it’s odd to see the flow of conversation, taken in its entirety, without interruption, with time neatly organized into a linear succession of conversational snippets, even
though, in that impervious leap from one message to the next, differentiated only by a date stamp, weeks had passed, whole crescendos of desire swelled, a whole car crash, rearrangements, revelations--all smoothed over and sublimated into a placid follow-up: Hey, how’ve you been? Now, opening the app, I still feel that pang of the hopeless romantic, the expectation that there will be some expression of sweetness or excitement. Instead, his message informs me that he has to push our date back an hour or so. Admittedly, it’s a relief to have some confirmation that the date is still happening at all, since I’ve come to expect cancellation.

  The date then gets pushed back another hour, so that what was originally intended to be a dinner becomes “grabbing a drink.” After my shift, which passes in a daze of mechanized suppression following my little moment, I have time to reconvene with myself and deliberate upon my appearance. I debate whether to douche; doing so would imply a certain level of commitment to anal sex on the first date--not a far reach for most gay men, but maybe something that’s become more habitual than intentional, in the way that dating apps themselves are a rite of habit, invoked as part of the ritual of scroll-swipe-send. It took a car crash for me to realize how badly I’ve been seeking something as simple as the blessing of sustained eye contact from a stranger in real life. Countless hours spent scrolling, countless AI profiles turning
conversation into algorithmic fodder, countless conversations proceeding so detachedly that they may as well have been held between two AI interfaces, all of which has amounted to not much more than a couple of glimpses of fleeting interest. Meanwhile, a few seconds of a real-life encounter--granted, a few seconds heightened by their extreme context--are enough to inoculate my life with such intensity that it suffuses everything proceeding from it with hope, with possibility, with the certainty that the human heart demands deeper connection. I want to chase after that: I want real life, I want a hope that can penetrate me. I decide to douche, after all.

  We meet in a flurry of headlights, in the parking lot outside of a failing bar, on a Tuesday, no less. Jerome looks similar to, if a bit wearier than, his profile pictures, which adds a gentle mist to my lone, protected sapling of hope. He has a kind of Germanic Midwestern appearance that invokes basically nothing in the soul, but which I nonetheless find somewhat hot, like a benign yet brawny garden gnome who sometimes can’t help his horny urges. He tells me he likes my “barista twink vibes.” Over a cosmopolitan (which I order because it’s Carrie Bradshaw’s favorite drink) (for him, a beer), he tells me that he works as a supermarket manager, which I
also find somewhat hot. Even so, I can’t swat away the effigy of Kevin, who glitches into my vision--a close-up of his face flashing across a jumbotron. I think about Kevin fucking pregnant women, I try to imagine what Kevin’s cock must look like, what it would feel like inside of me while I lapped at the riptide of his mouth. I imagine Kevin’s cock on a jumbotron, surrounded by an audience of pregnant women who watch on as it fucks me.

  After three rounds, Jerome takes me home. He asks me how the drinks were, and I reply,“Strong!” even though I feel just barely off-center from sober. I ask him, in turn, how were the beers, to which he says,

  “Not too bad. I’ve had better beers. Sometimes it’s not about the beer at all, but it’s about the pour. This is something I really take pride in as a gay man, knowing how to do the perfect pour. You have to know how the bubbles work. You can usually tell if it’s a good pour just from the smell released by those bubbles, get your nose in there a bit. If it doesn’t have that airy, kind of pacifying, motherly scent, then you didn’t angle the glass enough, or you moved too fast back into the vertical position. Moving slow--”

  I derail his tongue with my own, plunging my mouth onto his, driven partly by my lack of interest in beer pouring technicalities, but also partly by the sexiness of his neurodivergent passion for those same technicalities. As we’re making out, I seek out fireworks, I seek out light, finding only some sputtering embers, which, for now at least, are enough to keep me engrossed, though I’m in pursuit of something that resides in an indiscernible realm beyond. Clothing slowly peeling off like magnolia petals taken by the wind. I keep kissing his body and maneuvering around him in such a way that I don’t have to display my own full body in its unguarded bareness. After a wave of cocksucking, getting my ass eaten, and half-hearted dirty talk, I ask him if he wants to put his penis in me, to which he responds incoherently while nodding. Then, a grenade in my chest as I watch him reach over to his desk and pull out a
condom.

  “You’re not going to breed me?” I say.

  “What was that?” he asks.

  I enunciate more intently: “I want you to breed me.”

  “Ah,” he puckers, “I only fuck with condoms.”

“I’m on PrEP, though.”

“It’s just a precaution thing. I’ll cum in your mouth, if you want.”

“No, I want you to cum inside me while you’re fucking my hole.”

“I can do that, but it has to be with a condom on.”

“Why, though? We’re in the 21st century now, babe, you’re not going to get fucking AIDS.”

  Jerome puts the condoms back in the drawer, and I watch his erection steadily deflate. It’s these subtle infractions of desire that leave us with the ultimate impression that the gap between two people is as distant as two planetary systems, who each, separately, wonder, is there life in other galaxies? Desire is unbearable, in this way--never knowing the desires of the other, never knowing how to reconcile these two nebulous galaxies, two tectonic plates bound to crash in an earth-rupturing anticlimax. My orbital plane begins to falter.

  “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me,” says Jerome. “You really expect me to fuck you now, when you’re acting like that?”

  I’m crying before I can comprehend that I’m crying.

  “Are you seriously crying because I won’t fuck you bareback?”

  “It’s not only about that,” I say, my voice cracking. “I just want to connect with someone on a deeper level.” Wiping tears from my face, I wordlessly get dressed, feeling Jerome’s eyes on me as I stand naked in the persistent twilight of his floor lamp. The time on my phone reads 2 a.m., and in four hours I have to be back at Starbucks for my next shift. I leave Jerome’s apartment abruptly, and all the way back home, I am too busy untangling my stars to truly feel the undignified dejection of having douched for nothing. The golden glow of the street lamps inverts the colors of the night sky, so that it appears like an illuminated cathedral ceiling punctured with dark holes in the shapes of stars. Contemplating its vaults, I wonder if somewhere in the distant universe there’s another entangled lifeform wondering back.

  At the start of my shift, I text Jerome to apologize for my behavior the night before. The day passes in a haze of steamed milk and quiet shame without me getting an answer. I have the feeling that, like a Catholic child whose singular sinful slip-up begins to color every moment of their waking life with guilt, this one phrase I uttered in a crest of passion has totalized the impression of my entire being, taken on the elevated property of being the one thing he will remember me for. Though, to be fair, at the end of the day, I don’t think I could truly date a man who doesn’t want to breed me.

  The issue is ultimately one of dispassion, which is the plague of the modern man, who curbs and quells himself at every turn, conditioned to fear anything that might lead him astray from the daily demands of a career and a life of trying to maximize the likes on his thirst traps. Sex isn’t a problem, at least getting sex isn’t a problem, but emotional austerity is a whole different form of castration, even more violent because it metastasizes and mutates upon each encounter, spreading from body to body, turning a whole legion of queer desire into rotted, aborted embryos, pulled out of the body before they can develop into something real and alive. Nothing gives life new hope like someone wanting to be inside you so badly, wanting you so bad
that they don’t even have the capacity to think about putting on a condom. Above all, it’s about being wanted. Above all, I want to be fucked by someone who needs me.

  On the drive home from work, the main road is too congested, so my automated driver suggests taking an alternative route through some side streets, and my throat cinches at seeing that we’ll have to pass the intersection where Kevin and I crashed. As I cruise by the fated site, I notice a small memorial has been assembled at the roadside with a crucifix and wreath where Kevin’s wife died. I sit up and focus on the road, which is out of my control, which escapes under my tires as quickly as a body disappearing into the dust of hope. I hear Kevin’s voice: there’s so much hurt from this loss, and if I don’t try to fill it in, somehow, I’m afraid my heart
will stop. Once home, I take a hit off my bong and decide to text Kevin, I tell him I want to check in, I tell him I missed getting to talk to him.

  We agree to catch up at his on my day off, on which the sky has unfurled its clouds in a gentle autumn overcast, and the squirrels are all collecting nuts along the parklands in preparation for winter, and I long to join them in their dens. My body flutters at the precipice of Kevin’s doorway before ringing the doorbell, trying to recall the exact dimensions of his face. When he appears before me, all of his features fall into place, like a note that finally matches the right pitch. He comments that this isn’t ideal weather for my day off, and I answer that I don’t
mind it; the sun has been too blinding lately.

  “Blinding?” he says. “A post-accident symptom? Maybe you should get that
professionally checked out.”

  “No, I think it’s been like this for a while, even before the accident. It’s all been getting so blinding, and I’m walking around trying not to knock everything over.”

  “What do you mean by that?” he asks, carrying a coffee in one hand and a glass of water over to me in the other--he’s remembered that I don’t drink coffee. “What’s the main hurdle for you?”

  “Just work, working all the time and trying to be a full person, holding onto all this guilt still, and on top of that, gay dating in this city kind of feels like someone stabbing my eyes out, and then telling me they’re not ready for anything serious.”

  “Well,” he scoffs, then immediately looks somewhat forlorn, “I don’t know if I’m even able to think about dating right now. It’s hard, trying to manage this void without just trying to replace her. Plus, you know, my fixation adds some complexity to the situation.”

  “So you’re still on that? The preggers?” As I say this, I realize he’s hardly gotten rid of anything in the house since the last time I was here: the baby carriage, the unassembled crib.

  “Recently--” his gaze turns to the ether “--I had a dream that really affected me. My wife was with me, again, and I was kissing her round belly, and telling her how much I loved her. Then, her belly began to split open, but instead of a baby inside, it was full of light, a powerful, palpable orb of light, and when it touched my face, it felt soft and remedying, I felt all of my pain go away.

  “So I realized how badly I wanted to feel my pain go away, if just for a brief moment. I started scouting for someone who might give me some relief. But pregnant women who are single don’t exactly come in spades. First, I tried hooking up with someone who just had a fat belly, but that wasn’t helpful; if anything it made her lack of pregnancy all the more apparent. Then, I signed up for an escort site. I tried looking for a while, and eventually, I did find one--a younger woman who was in the early stages of her pregnancy, though her belly was showing enough. I sent her a message, and we set up a meeting. She came over, but once she got here, the guilt hit me--I mean, you have to be in a pretty tough place to capitalize on your body while you’re pregnant. I ended up just giving her some money, and we never did anything. But this void keeps eating at me, and I’m scared. I don’t want it to fuck up my whole life. I just feel so bad all the time.”

  As Kevin’s face loses its composure and gives into sniffles, I reach out and squeeze his wrist, and sitting here, with his hand in mine, watching him sob, I feel the pulse of my cock dilate into the inner lining of my pants. When I get home, I see that there’s a splotch of wet, sticky with precum, in my underwear, as if my water broke. I turn naked in my dusty mirror and envision the invisible contour where the parabola of my belly would protrude if I were pregnant. I see this imaginary vacancy as vividly as if it were painted onto the air. What I seek is not what I lack, but the allure of what could be, in the way that a child, when asked what superpower they’d have, doesn’t sense the lack of having that superpower, but rather their desire is calibrated into this new circuit of potential. The vacancy is imaginary in that we create its shape by colluding it with what could be--a hole has a presence, an empty space has a unique appeal of its own, they call it ma in Japanese, time holding its breath. The difference between a vacancy and an occupancy is merely a matter of time, direction, and finding the right connection. I put on a loose
shirt and bundle up my clothes into a ball, then place them under my shirt on my abdomen, and already I see myself swelling into the perimeter of my imaginary vacancy.

  Already the sun is on its last rungs, and I decide to go for a walk to catch the dwindling light. Among toddlers conjuring chalk flowers on the sidewalk and teenage girls rushing to flee the scene of parental serfdom, I see an elderly man carrying a scant cluster of roses, and it invokes in me a feeling of genuine fondness towards someone else’s happiness. In fact, it offers some hope that even in old age, the pursuit of love persists, though there’s a stinging melancholy to the fear that that pursuit could also still be in vain. I resolve to follow the old man: I want to
see the light of his lover’s face upon receiving the roses. I imagine a woman, also in old age, waiting at the terrace of some café for an agreed upon dinner date, or at her home preparing dishes. After following the man for a few blocks, though, it’s clear that we’re moving further away from the residential strip and towards, instead, the cemetery. The old man enters and I stop at the cemetery gates, watching him identify a grave and lay the roses before it. As the sun proceeds into its dark den, it seems to take with it not just light, but the fluttering of my heart, too, which senses that there is only so much time we have to be loved.

  One morning, as I’m frothing milk at the brink of dawn, I have a revelation.

  While it’s true that scientists have been able to create a bi-paternal human baby in vitro, there’s still something crucial in the reproductive assemblage that the male parents lacked, which is gestation. Researchers have been able to successfully bridge this disparity in mice, though, inducing pregnancy in male mice through the surgical implantation of a bioengineered uterus derived from pluripotent stem cells. Following immunosuppressive conditioning to prevent organ rejection, the male mice received the uterus, succeeded by an embryo transfer. Incredibly, the embryonic development proceeded to full term in about half of cases, and viable offspring
were delivered via cesarean section. Still too risky to roll out to the public, the procedure would need to undergo human testing to determine the efficacy of bioengineered uteruses in human males.

  The day that I receive a letter from the clinic informing me of my acceptance as one of 10 initial test subjects for the efficacy of gestation in human males, I call my Starbucks manager and quit, effective immediately, and a thousand rare orchids blossom in my stomach. It’s the winter solstice, and the trees are barren, but all the way on the drive to the clinic I see time kaleidoscoping on their branches, where vacancies will sprout leaves soon enough, and seedlings will ripple through the air, bound towards the miracle of becoming as they come to rest on the surface of the earth. The lead researcher guides me through several modules about risks and implications before we can begin the procedure, all of which was already covered in the introductory packet, but which I attentively listen to and savor, as each risk heightens the importance of what I’m undertaking, makes it all the more intentional and therefore sacred. She recapitulates the results of the experiment on mice, emphasizing that the births had a 50% success rate, and warns that two of the mice died--in humans, the risk is even higher, given our more complex physiology. I understand, I tell her. You’re ready? she says. I’m ready.

  I’m placed in a hospital gown and shown to the surgical room. They’ve already selected a feasible embryo that was fertilized in vitro from sperm and male stem cells. Before going under, I’m made to watch from the bed an AI-generated video depicting how the course of the surgery will proceed on a virtual replica of my body, and then I sign the final papers. The anesthesiologist enters the room, and I realize it’s the same handsome anesthesiologist who was at the hospital for my surgery after the car crash. I smile at him as he bends over my body to insert the endotracheal tube into my throat, and, even though he’s wearing a mask, I can tell that he’s smiling back as I descend into a warm aurora borealis.

  I float in the eddying envelopment of this aurora borealis, with neither direction nor the feeling of time passing, but merely the sense of a reality that’s unraveling and re-stitching itself anew in constant flux. A being that first appears as a resplendent corona of color and light scintillates into the form of an angel, its wingspan stretching so far into the pink vapor that I can’t see where it comes to a taper. The angel speaks in a mellow, androgynous intonation: Hail thou that art full of grace. I open my mouth to respond, but no sound is produced from the clenching of my vocal chords. Fear not, the angel continues, for thou hast found favor with the Passing. For lo thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bear a daughter, and shalt call her by the Name of her that was slain in the automobile. Behold, the blessed daughter shall be the first that prospereth from the womb of a man: and she shall be the beginning of the new creation. And unto him that is heavy of heart, his pain shall flee away, for the former things are passed. For with the Passage shall nothing be impossible. Then, the angel departs, by way of blinking into the silent storm of color, becoming a ribbon of crimson, which knits itself into the shimmering aurora, as I’m left hovering with the feeling of a light, pleasant static tingling across my belly. When I wake up from my surgery, the nurses are beaming at me, and I have a perfect view out of the window, where I watch the first snowfall of winter begin.

  In January, I remain at the hospital for recovery, and I notice, outside of my room’s window, that it looks out onto a small rose garden, which is delicately anointed in a thin sheet of snow; in February, the lead researcher tells me that I’ll have to stay in the hospital longer than they initially planned, because the doctors are concerned that my body is struggling to balance the demands of the embryo and my own nutritional needs, so I’ll have to be monitored daily and intubated; in March, I first start to notice my stomach swelling, its convex threshold against my gown entering into the imaginary vacancy, and I check its growth daily in the mirror; in April, my heart grows ever fuller; in May, I delete Grindr, I delete Tinder, I delete Eros, I delete everything, and I watch the rose garden start to bloom; in June, the doctors tell me I can go out on my own, without monitoring, and I visit the cathedral and, kneeling at the altar, I thank the Lord and the angels; in July, the doctors deem the gestation successful. They tell me the baby has a 90% chance of survival through to delivery by cesarean section, and that, at the very least, my own body will be fine, having fully adapted to the uterus and the developing fetus.

  Standing at Kevin’s door, at the apex of a July afternoon, I recall the last time we talked--though it’s true that we’ve texted on and off in the interim, we haven’t seen each other face to face since before my surgery, and through our texts I never let on to my undertaking--I recall the sincerity of his fear of having to live forever with that implacable void. I remember, then, the first time we met, the way he described how pregnant women looked “complete.” Caressing my own baby bump, which protrudes quite conspicuously from under a gray tee that reads “YALE,” I am awash in a feeling of completion, as if I’ve finished constructing a bridge across the pitiless abyss that once battered me with its hollowness: at the barista counter, on dates bound towards malaise, at night when my loneliness was most present on the unsunken mattress. The bridge is ready to be crossed at last.

  Finally, I press the doorbell--my transmission into the universe--as my chest is pressed into my heart. I hear the lock unlatch, and Kevin opens the door, eying me up and down without a sound. Then: “Come in.” I step inside, and he closes the door. Reverent, wordless, Kevin falls to his knees and places his hands on my stomach, and he begins to deliquesce into tears while planting kisses as diaphanous as daily graces all across the warm protuberance, up to the pinnacled belly button, up the arc curving back in, up my sternum, as my cock starts to expand in his tenderness. His kisses move further upwards until our mouths coincide, and I feel Kevin’s own erection pressing against my distended belly.

  Tell me I’m yours. Tell me we were always meant to be. Tell me about the way I smell, the way my pheromones drive you into a frenzy. Tell me you’re the one who dreams of me. Tell me we’re perfect, we’re complete. Tell me we’re one kiss away from happily ever after. Tell me we’re fertile for the future, ripe with desire. We’re filled to the skin with it--oozing with the potential for a year’s worth of devouring. Tell me you’ll devour me, I am your fruit, I’m your providential harvest, what you’ve toiled all your life in anticipation of, and I’m ready for it. I’m
ready for the reaping. I’m glistening and full. I am your orchard. Rest your head on me, on my belly, and listen, and you might hear not one heartbeat, but two, cascading over each other like a hundred apples landing on soft ground, unbruised.


René Bennett writes about desire and catastrophe.

SHARE - Issue: 1.8 / April 2026