My Baby

Clinical Summary

Abigail was raised in a basement. Roadkill came through a slot in the floor. Sponge bath on Sundays, her mother holding her nose the whole time, not looking at the girl's face. When they put her on a bus at eighteen with a thrift-store bag and a ticket for wherever the road quit being her problem, she took one thing with her: the vow she had made to the dark. She would have a child. She would love it the way no one had loved her. That want had been down there with her since before she had a word for it. It had grown teeth in the waiting.

Every clinic said no. Her age. Her records. The forms no one helped her fill out right. Then she found Farrow Creek Labs, a website with clean sans-serif type and the word discretion placed exactly where a woman in her position would need to see it. The offer: a room. Meals. Free for the duration of the study. Experimental fertilization. Complete confidentiality. Abigail said yes before she had finished reading the sentence, because the alternative was another night alone with the want, and she had done enough of that already.

She did not ask what the experiment was. That is the last decision she makes in this book that still belongs to her.

What Farrow Creek is doing in those rooms, what they are growing inside her body, what is present in the room when it's finally done: this is maximum-severity body horror built from the bones of a woman who has been told no so many times that yes from the wrong source still registers as grace. The surgical detail is precise. The reproductive horror is clinical and total. The love Abigail carries through all of it is the most accurate thing in the book. That combination is the whole point.

Author Statement

Abigail is not a monster. She is the thing that gets built when a child is used as waste long enough and then released into a world that has no language for what was done to her. What she wants is not complicated. It is the most human want there is. The horror is not that she wants it. The horror is what an institution is willing to hand a woman that desperate in exchange for her body and her silence.

Every surgical scene in this book is load-bearing. The science fiction is not spectacle. It is the logical extension of the way certain institutions already treat people who have run out of options and are grateful for the wrong kind of help. Farrow Creek is not invented. Farrow Creek is just honest about what it is. Most institutions with the same goals have cleaner websites and don't tell you.