2023 Short Story & Essay Contest: First Place, Adult Short Story Contest
The fertility clinic was too white. White walls, white lights, white furniture. The only color came from the plethora of baby photos that peppered the walls, evidence that this clinic got results. Julien sat in one of the white pleather armchairs, waiting to be ushered into an exam room where they would take her blood and do an ultrasound of her ovaries, checking to see if the hormones were doing their job and her eggs were ready to be harvested. Every time she moved, the squeaking chair announced her presence to the whole waiting room, which currently included a gum-smacking receptionist and a young couple perched on the love seat across from Julien. They looked too young to be here, too young to have tried and failed enough times to need this level of intervention. Too young to have enough money for fertility treatments. Didn’t this cost like tens of thousands of dollars? Julien was barely able to pay rent each month, and these people could pour all that money down the drain just because they wanted to make a new baby instead of giving a home to one of the millions of kids without parents who already existed?
Julien felt a sudden wave of anger rise up inside her. Could this couple be her match? Was this woman taking the hormones that would prepare her uterus to carry the child that would come from Julien’s egg? Was this man steeling himself to walk into an empty room with a cup and a magazine? Would his physical features be mashed together with her own in a child that this other woman would bear? These people couldn’t be any older than she was. Who were they to raise her child? Who were they to believe themselves deserving of this gift?
But then, it wasn’t her child, not really. And it wasn’t a gift, either. They talked about it like it was, all the people at the clinic. They told Julien how kind she was to do this for an unknown couple, how much it would mean to them. What they didn’t talk about was the $12,000 this mystery couple was paying Julien for her trouble.
Julien eyed the rings on the woman’s finger. The wedding band was simple, but the engagement ring was gaudy. Julien hated gaudy engagement rings, and she hated women who wore them. Especially after they were married. Everyone was getting engaged these days, it seemed. Julien’s whole Instagram feed was overflowing with peripheral friends waving their newly adorned fingers at the camera. Julien still felt too young for that. Marriage. Wife. They were such big words. Grown-up words. She’d been in a relationship for three years and still she couldn’t picture him down on one knee asking her a big, grown-up question like that. So maybe she imagined it sometimes, played out the scenario in her head. But that was just a game of make-believe. It wasn’t real life.
She told people she didn’t want it, said marriage was stupid and patriarchal. And she did believe that. White dresses? Like anyone was a virgin these days. And the father giving the bride to another man? The whole thing was creepy and outdated. But that didn’t stop her from watching proposal videos on YouTube. Or slipping her ring off her index finger and onto the ring finger of her left hand. Sometimes. Just to see what it looked like.
The woman reached her hand toward the man, without looking at him. Silently, he took it in his and gave it a gentle squeeze. They were nervous. Whatever they were here for, whether it was Julien’s eggs or a consultation, or whatever, they were nervous. And Julien was being a judgmental assh—. She bit her lip and pulled her gaze away from the couple. It wasn’t their fault if they were more settled than she was, more adult. They probably owned a home and had careers instead of resumes that were dotted with six-month gigs here and there. Maybe they did deserve these eggs more than Julien did.
“Are we decent?” the nurse asked, knocking on the door.
“Come in,” Julien replied, rolling her eyes as she buttoned her jeans.
She hated this pretend respect for her privacy as though this woman hadn’t just watched a doctor stick a wand up Julien’s vagina.
“Everything looks great,” the nurse informed her, entering the room. “The doctor says we’re ready to go for tomorrow, so you’ll take the trigger shot at exactly 8 o’clock tonight. You know which one is the trigger shot?”
Julien nodded, fighting to keep the frustration out of her face. Everyone was so goddamn patronizing here. Julien was closer to 30 than she was 20. She hated being spoken to like she was a child.
“OK, good. And have you ever been under general anesthesia before?”
“Yes,” Julien told her. “The last time I donated eggs.”
“Oh, well then, you know how it goes,” the nurse said with a smile.
But Julien saw the tension at the corners of her mouth, saw the hint of judgment in her eyes. Donate once and people think you’re this great philanthropist, out there giving wealthy people the babies they deserve. Donate twice, though, and you become a repeat offender. They assume you don’t want children of your own, that all you care about in this world is cash. They look at you like you’re livestock, not a person. It’s like with every egg you give them, they take a part of your personhood, too.
“Yeah, I’m a pro,” Julien said, matching the nurse’s fake smile.
“OK, well, you are all set then. And we will see you here bright and early tomorrow morning. Do you have someone to pick you up? You won’t be allowed to drive yourself home.”
Again, with the patronizing bulls—. Like they hadn’t already told her this 17 times. Like she hadn’t just told this nurse it wasn’t her first rodeo.
“My boyfriend,” Julien said.
She caught the quick flash of surprise in the nurse’s face. Everyone always assumed Julien must be single if she was doing this. What did they think, that no one would let their partner sell potential future children? That donating eggs was just for wannabe spinsters?
“Great,” the nurse said, pulling her face back into an empty smile. “We’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“See you tomorrow,” Julien echoed, her own face mimicking the nurse’s. “Bright and early.”
Julien cupped the mug of coffee between her hands, surveying his naked body, half covered by the crumpled sheets. The heat seeped through the ceramic mug into the soft skin of her palms. She watched as the breath moved in and out of his body, the thin sheet moving with him. She set the mug down on the nightstand on his side of the bed. She wasn’t allowed to eat or drink before the surgery this morning. Carefully, very carefully, she pulled the sheet back, revealing the full nakedness of him. She did this sometimes, studied him. She wanted to trace her fingers along his body, wanted to follow the lines of each muscle, explore every crack and crevice. She wanted to know him completely.
They were often naked as they moved around the apartment. Sometimes when he bent over, maybe to pick something up, or stretch a muscle, she would catch a glimpse of his asshole, winking seductively at her. She was fairly certain it was the single part of his body she had never touched. She wasn’t particularly sure that she wanted to touch it, not in a real, physical sense. But the way it teased her felt unbearable. A reminder that they were two separate beings, that parts of him would always be unknowable to her.
He moaned and shifted. With a sigh, Julien pulled her eyes from his body and her thoughts from his anus and turned instead to the floor-to-ceiling window. The street below was quiet. It was early. The city still slept. Across from her was another building, also made of glass and steel apartments stacked one on top of the other, also with floor-to-ceiling windows. Julien knew her nakedness was on full display for her neighbors across the street. She was not by nature an exhibitionist, but she did feel a sense of stubbornness about her right to be nude in her own home. In some small way she felt that by exerting this basic right she was sticking it to the idiot developers who built glass buildings meant for habitation so close together, so open. She was sullying their glistening ideals with the pornographic humanity of her naked body.
Finally, accepting that she had run out the clock on sunrise self-reflection, Julien turned to him. “Time to get up,” she said softly.
He said nothing but reached out a hand and playfully shoved her away from him. She leaned over and kissed him gently on the head. He let out a happy moan.
“I made you coffee,” she told him, turning toward her dresser.
“You’re too good to me,” he said, still not moving.
“I know,” she agreed. “Can you be ready to walk out the door in 10 minutes?”
He shot up from the bed and wrapped his arms around her tight, kissing her sloppily on the cheek. “Ten minutes it is.”
She laughed and shoved him away. “Get dressed and drink your coffee.”
The coffee was still steaming. He picked up the mug and took a big swig. Julien would never have been able to do that. Her tongue had no tolerance for heat. He took another big gulp and then grabbed his clothes and headed to the bathroom.
Julien began to dress herself. She had gained weight recently. Or, she had recently noticed that she’d gained weight. The weight, it seemed, had crept up on her slowly, and now her jeans hugged her hips and thighs slightly more than was comfortable but not enough to move up a size. She wasn’t sure how much of it was related to the hormones and how much was just a matter of getting older and softer.
She pulled the jeans over her belly, sore from the nightly injections over the last week. She had alternated between left and right side each night, hoping to spread out the discomfort rather than focus it to one spot. She didn’t fully understand how she could safely insert a needle so far into herself, did not know how far in it really went. Where did the skin end and the muscle begin? And her ovaries? How far beneath the surface were they?
She could feel them as she zipped the jeans. They were engorged, filled to the brim with follicles that were now headed into her uterus for the doctor to remove in just a couple of hours. She pulled on a T-shirt, and then, changing her mind, swapped it for one of his. It was his high school band shirt. It was oversized on her and worn with age. It made her feel safe.
“Great shirt,” he said with a grin when he popped out of the bathroom, fully dressed and rubbing his wet hair vigorously with a towel. He started every day with a two-minute rinse. It was a level of discipline Julien didn’t even bother aspiring to. “You ready?” he asked.
Julien put her hand to her abdomen. It felt foreign and swollen, pressed uncomfortably against the stiff denim of her high-waisted jeans. Yes, she was very ready to be done with all this. She nodded and followed him out the door.
The last thing she remembered before going under was the anesthesiologist placing the mask on her face and telling her to count backward from 10. Everything went black before she hit four.
After the blackness, there was Abigail, her college roommate, having an abortion right there in their dorm room.
Before that, before Abigail, Julien hadn’t even known it worked like that. She’d thought abortion meant surgery. She hadn’t known about a pill. But Abigail had gone to Planned Parenthood and she’d come back with a pill.
She’d soaked the bedsheets in blood. And Julien had done nothing. She’d done worse than nothing. She had stayed away, stopping in the room only for essentials. What do you say to someone whose body is in the process of ripping apart and expelling fetal tissue in the middle of your shitty little shared room?
When Abigail had missed her period, Julien had told her not to worry, people missed their periods all the time. Except that Julien never had. Not once. Since that very first day she’d started to bleed in the middle of her seventh grade math class, her cycles had been eerily regular. Always she bled for four days, always 28 days apart.
The first time Abigail threw up, Julien had told her it was just the dining hall food, those eggs would make anyone sick. Except that Julien hadn’t thrown up. Julien didn’t feel suddenly and overwhelmingly nauseated by the smells that surrounded them. And when Abigail had said she was going to buy a pregnancy test, Julien had laughed it off, telling her she was being paranoid, but if it would make her feel better to know for certain…
But why? Why had Julien been so in denial? Why had she ignored the obvious signs, forcing her certainty on Abigail? Abigail who knew. Because Abigail had known. It was happening to her body, and from the very start she had just known.
Julien had taken a handful of pregnancy tests before. A couple in high school and one just the year before, when they were sophomores. They’d all come back negative. And somehow Julien had known they would. She had known the way Abigail had known they wouldn’t for her, had felt the absence where her friend had felt a presence. And, of course, she’d been relieved. Of course she had. Because if the minus had been a plus or there’d been two lines instead of one, what then? Then she would have been the one writhing in the twin bed and ruining her duvet. Because she wouldn’t have kept any of those babies. Couldn’t have. And yet, this small part of her had hoped, each and every time.
And then, as she’d watched Abigail bloody her sheets, Julien had felt it again. That ache. That intense desire to feel a life inside of her. But it was more than that. She wanted the life, yes, but in a deep, dark place she also knew that she wanted the loss. She wanted to feel what Abigail was feeling. Not the physical pain, but the feeling. The real, deep, pure, animal feeling.
She felt somehow that for her own sense of womanhood, losing a child was as important as bearing one. It pressed on her like an unexpressed gender identity, toying with her sense of self when she stared in the mirror for too long. It repulsed her, this jealousy she felt. This twisted desire to create and destroy within the confines of her uterus.
She had been cruel to Abigail afterward, for a time. Had made excuses not to spend time with her, had slept around to avoid having to return to the room at night, had dreamed of condoms tearing, her IUD letting her down.
She’d read that if you got pregnant with an IUD there was an increased risk of ectopic pregnancy, a fetus growing outside of your uterus. This idea had disgusted and delighted Julien. The notion that her body could do something like that. How completely horrifying to think that her body not only had the capacity to grow life, but that it could do so in the inhospitable space outside her womb. In most cases, the embryo grows in one of the fallopian tubes, but it could attach to the ovaries or somewhere else in the abdomen. She’d also read that ectopic pregnancies were almost never carried to term. Often, they ended in miscarriage, which sometimes caused life-threatening bleeding. If detected, the answer was clear-cut: abort.
These thoughts had plagued Julien in the days, weeks, months after Abigail’s abortion. Eventually, Julien had been able to make the thoughts go away. At the time, she’d thought she’d banished them from her brain. Now it seemed she had simply suppressed them, burying them deep in the fertile soil of her subconscious where they had rooted and now, nearly a decade later, burst forth in a blinding array of color as the anesthesia released its grasp on her.
Julien felt hot tears streaming down her cheeks. She blinked and, as the world came back to her, his face materialized, hovering just a few feet away. She started to sit up and he moved toward her, pulling her into him. He held her in his arms as the world settled back into place. The closeness of him, the smell of his skin, helped bring her back to the present. She nestled her head into the cavity below his Adam’s apple, tears still flowing freely and dampening his skin and the collar of his T-shirt. She longed to be closer, to be naked with him, skin pressed fully against skin, bodies melding together into one. He’d had this effect on her from the first time he’d pressed his lips to hers. She assumed this was what people meant when they talked about love.
“Why are you crying?” he asked her softly.
Julien shook her head, still pressed into him.
“I don’t know,” she lied, whispering into his neck.
The doctors had warned her that she would be extra fertile in the days following the procedure. It would take awhile for the hormone levels in her body to return to normal. Plus, she’d had to go off birth control. She had told him about the birth control and about not being allowed to have sex before the surgery because if she got pregnant then she couldn’t go through with the donation and she wouldn’t get paid. But she hadn’t mentioned anything about afterward. Hadn’t told him about her heightened fertility. Why was that?
And what if she got pregnant now? Would the answer seem as straightforward as it had been all those years ago? It was harder, now, to imagine a world of ectopic pregnancies, of miscarriages and abortions. She was older, had her first steady job, was in a committed relationship. What would he say if she gave him news like that? Would he tell her to end it? Would she agree? Or would he go out and buy her an expensive, gaudy ring to make an honest woman of her yet? Did people still do things like that? Get married over something like a baby? It seemed trivial compared to better health insurance or a green card.
She thought of the couple in the waiting room from the day before. Would that be them someday? Spending thousands on hormone injections instead of earning thousands from them? Julien had no reason to believe she had any fertility issues. She knew for a fact that her eggs were plentiful. But she also knew their number was finite. And she’d just sold her second batch. She thought of the woman’s diamond ring and then of her own barren finger. She felt suddenly empty. An hour ago she had been full of ripe and ready eggs, resting in her uterus, ready to be harvested. And now they were gone and she would never get them back. She was overcome by the need to fill this void she had created in herself.
She pressed her lips to his, pulling him into a deep, desperate kiss. She wanted to tear his clothes off and climb on top of him right here on this hospital bed. She wanted to feel him deep inside her, wanted to fill herself with him. She wanted to put his love and loyalty to the test, wanted to make him prove himself. Wanted to hold the plastic pee stick between her fingers with wonder, wanted to put it in a pretty little box and present it to him over a home-cooked meal, candles burning between them on the table to set the mood.
He pulled away from the kiss. He reached up and wiped the tears from her cheek. “I love you so much,” he told her. “So much.” And he pressed his lips gently to her forehead.
And she loved him. And she loved their life together, their life of freedom.
“We can’t have sex for like another month,” Julien confessed, new tears quickly replacing the ones he’d cleaned away. “They said I should wait ’til I get my period again cause I’m still like extra fertile.”
“Oh,” he said, “well, that’s a bummer. But better safe than sorry, right?”
“Yeah,” Julien agreed, “better safe than sorry.”
She pulled away from him and turned to her pile of clothes, neatly folded on the table next to the bed. She took off her hospital gown. As she pulled his band T-shirt over her head, she wiped the fabric against her face, trying to erase the silent flow of tears.
It was better like this. Better to have told him. Better not knowing what that life would feel like inside her, what he would say or do. Better to let the question linger. To sit with the dull ache of desire rather than face the sharp sting of disappointment.
Eve Cantler
Lives in: Washington, D.C.
Age: 29
What she does: She gets paid to work as a contractor with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) while she pays to get her master’s in reading and literacy at the George Washington University.
Favorite place to write: “At my desk, while the cat snoozes on the windowsill in the afternoon sun.”
Favorite author: “Tamora Pierce—and my favorite moment is when Alanna gets her period while she’s pretending to be a boy so she can train to be a knight.”
How she got the idea for this story: “By letting my mind wander while I sat in the waiting room to donate eggs.”
Up next: Finishing her first novel
