The Day The Concrete Took Over
I went into labour around six in the morning. Whatever I had been expecting in terms of pain, this was worse. The doctor had told me time and time again that I should abort this pregnancy but I had refused. The miracle of birth is one of the greatest gifts that the Almighty has bestowed upon us and I was not going to turn it away simply because Mr Intellectual Doctor said my baby was a concrete slab.
What did he know after all, he was just like those jerks that keep going on about how the planet is getting warmer and warmer, and you know what? Even though I don't know much about science, I do know that for the last 30 years summer is still too hot and winter is still too cold. Doc could get stuffed, I thought. I was having my concrete slab if that is what I was meant to have. Many people have given birth to concrete slabs, and they have managed, so why should I be the exception.
As the pregnancy slowly came to term I could feel the slab growing iron beams inside me, I could taste their rust in my mouth. When I coughed, cement dust would fly out of my throat. My saliva became thicker and during the last month it was hard to swallow without choking. But it had its good moments too: I would spit large wads of this stuff on the table and my daughter Hellen would make these adorable 'pregnant mommy' cement statues from it.
Finally, my womb felt like ground zero in New York, a pit of asbestos from which something beautiful would grow and change the world, like Rudolph Giuliani - but better. Nights became a little harder to manage, because I am the type of person who likes to sleep on my side and this would make my slab shift and crush my liver and organs - it stung too because of the jagged iron beams sticking out from its sides - so I had to keep it in balance all through the night. My geeky doctor kept insisting that we should use ultrasound to break the slab into smaller bits to make labour easier, but, quite frankly, I thought that would be a little... unnatural. Why not give birth just like God intended? Adam and Eve did not have ultrasound and they seem to have managed fine.
But to cut a long story short, the day came when I went into labour, and like I said it was terribly painful. For a little while I thought that I should have listened to that idiotic doctor, but then the rusty iron beams shot out from the slab, through my spine, and pierced my brain, killing me instantly.
My corpse slid off the operating table and landed with a thud on the floor, cracking tiles with its incredible weight. Then it began to rumble and bulge, like a balloon filling with water from a tap. The pressure was so great that its eyeballs flew out of its head with funny popping sounds and splashed on the ceiling. Its eye sockets, nostrils and ears became fountains that sprayed concrete at high pressure over everyone in the room. The nurses and doctors made a try for the exits, but just then a wide river of concrete ruptured my womb, exploded outwards, and filled the room. It broke the doors with its weight and sloshed into the corridor, rolling over the screaming staff and burying them alive. It kept on flowing and flowing, eventually burying the hospital and the surrounding area under a lake of concrete.
This was long, long ago. Twenty years later my other children built an ice skating ring over the site and Hellen, being the youngest one, spent her life taking care of it. She would make sure that the ice was always smooth and deep, that people were always given the correct size of ice skates and that they got their own shoes back when they were done, that the Coke machines were always filled, and that the music playing on the PA was tasteful, all the things a small town skating ring ought to get right. Hellen never married. She always kept a picture of me hung in her office wall. The years passed, and she eventually became an old woman, too tired to care for the ice ring. Then one warm summer night she passed away in her bed, the "pregnant mommy" statues she had made so long ago still there on her bedroom shelf.
And so, with no one to care for it, the ice ring was eventually abandoned. But by then, of course, the terrorists had won, so there were no good people left to help keep a wholesome place like that running anyway.
But deep deep under the concrete, my corpse still frozen in space and time, I lie on what used to be the cracked floor of a hospital, and year after year I sing songs of freedom to the world above, waiting for the day when the free world will arise to defeat the terrorists, and good people will return and ice skate over my concrete baby once again.
It won't come to pass for quite some time, but I can wait. I have all the time in the world.
