A small snippet of the piece I’m currently working on for my non-fiction class. Please be advised: this scene is sorta graphic.

I used to read books about a young woman in the old pioneer days, who had her own ship and sailed around, discovering things and narrowly avoiding being raped left and right. I enjoyed the books, but they were the cause of my first nightmares. They were horrible and plagued me a few weeks even after I stopped reading.

Now they’ve returned, without any obvious trigger, and tear into my nightly rest with such fervor that I’m uncertain of what to do and how to act. I wake up in a sweat and curl into myself, feeling tears burn at the corners of my eyes. Sometimes I’ll feel my stomach lurch and I worry I might throw up, spew the nameless child I have growing in my gut upon the floor. Maybe it’ll squirm, its umbilical cord filling my throat, and I’ll have to bite it with my own two teeth and swallow to get it back inside me. Maybe the child will cry and beg to be fed as it wiggles its body in the fluids I spat up. Do you think I’d also deliver the placenta through my mouth? Hack that up upon my floor? I think I’d pick up the child eventually. Maybe I’d give it a name, or maybe I wouldn’t. I’d probably drive myself to the local hospital and claim the child was abandoned nearby, even as I drooled birthing fluids from my mouth. They’d take the child, of course, and I’d quickly leave before they received any of my information. I’d find somewhere to curl up and cry over myself.

Or maybe I wouldn’t.

Maybe I’d just die spitting out a child. Maybe it’d clog up my airways and we’d both lie there, flailing, unable to call for help as we suffocated on each other. I don’t know. It’s not something I like to think about, but I manage to think about it a lot. I sit in bed and curl my fingers around my hair and wonder, oh do I wonder, if men do this. Do they wake up in the middle of the night, in a sweat, tears in their eyes, from a nightmare that consisted of rape and childbirth? Do they wake up, their intestines tangled in a knot and vomit threatening to spill out because of what someone might do?