Dark Lullaby by Polly Ho-Yen (ready to read books .txt) 📕

to miss. It could be something decorative, but I’m sure it’s a camera. I stare into it, unblinking. And then, slowly, the gates rumble open.

I jump back into the car, press forwards. It’s a long drive still to the house, each second passes painfully. This is the last move I can make and I have no way of knowing if it’s a dead end or a route to the centre of a maze.

He’s there to greet me when I pull up outside the door. I recognise him immediately from the way he stands, the shape of his body, the tilt of his head.

It’s too big, this house, for only one man to live in. There should be a family filling it; there should be staff, discreet in the background.

But there is only him. For a reason I can’t explain, I’m sure that it’s only him.

‘It’s Kit, isn’t it?’ he says.

‘Jonah,’ I answer back.

THEN

I swiped away the article on the Spheres I’d been reading when I heard Thomas’s key in the door. It was a piece about the success of XC babies and it made me think of Jonah and his daughter, Genevieve. I had no way of knowing for sure, now I had stopped work, but Genevieve’s XC should have been born by now and cleared for them to take home. I’d seen with other clients that the XC newborns were monitored for a period of time outside of the artificial womb before they were given to the parents. They needed more time to build up their microbiomes. What with that and the longer gestational periods, the XC babies being handed to their parents in photos in the article were much more developed than I remembered Jakob as a newborn in the hospital.

I’d been waiting for Thomas to return home, my skin prickling each time I heard any sound that might be him. There’d been a few false starts, when I’d risen from my chair before I realised it was just the sound of someone passing in the corridor, when the door had remained stubbornly closed under my watchful stare.

I had news. Not the news that we were hoping for, and I wanted to tell him in person. Being on my own all day, without anyone to share it with, I could sense it multiplying inside me as the hours passed. At first it had felt containable, but it kept doubling in size, growing from two to four, four to eight, eight to sixteen. And now the information that had sprung up on my workSphere that morning was something with a shell, an outer and an inner, something alive.

I was on him before he had shaken off the outside, his bag still in hand, the skin of his coat around him. I remember the look of surprise as I embraced him. I held him hard, needing to feel something different from my liquid insides that squirmed and turned around my centre.

‘I’ve got to go in for more tests,’ I mumbled into his coat. It was just a bit too rough against my cheek, like sandpaper or calloused skin.

‘Tests? What kind of tests?’

Thomas’s arms were still around me but he was trying to let go of me. He wanted to speak to my face. I clung on to him tighter. It would be easier to tell him if I didn’t have to look at him, if he wasn’t looking at me.

‘I might… I might have something wrong with me.’ I was like a child. I couldn’t speak in details. I could only face a vague, rounded truth.

Thomas took a breath as if he were about to speak but the air had become trapped inside him. I was aware of his pulse beating through his chest and arms.

I released him then and looked into his troubled, worried eyes.

‘The induction drugs,’ I said slowly in explanation, not trusting my voice not to fall apart.

* * *

On another day, I leapt up from my desk and went to greet him, to surprise him with the news. The news that we wanted.

But as soon as he saw my face, something changed in his. It was more complicated than any one emotion. It was cut through with despair, riddled with panic, heavy with hope.

Of course he didn’t say anything of the sort, he whooped when I told him, lifted me up and swung me round. He laid his palm across my stomach. He insisted on going out to get my favourite food for dinner and kept repeating it was the best news, it was just the best news.

It was the best, it was just the best.

* * *

We were lucky, we told ourselves. And we said that because it was true.

The tests had caught the pre-cancerous cells early and the operation went smoothly. I recovered quickly.

These words make it feel contained; I know that, I like that.

* * *

Sometimes in the first moments of waking, I would forget and then remember I was pregnant. I would study myself for any sign of it and in the early days, when I would find none I could distinguish, I would catch my disappointment dropping through me like rain.

There seemed to be no time and too much time before she was born. I was impatient for her arrival and yet there was so much that we needed to do before then, that I fell into a sort of lethargy about it.

Thomas and I trailed round the Outstanding Homes for longer than we should have and so we ended up bickering and hungry from decision-making and adrenaline. We’d moved into a small house in the west quarter when I became pregnant and had been awarded the according housing credits. It was one of the newer builds with bedrooms on the ground floor and a single open living space on the first floor that would reach more light. It took us a while to decide on a property and now we just had to disagree on how to