Okay, I've been working on a series of monologues for women, dwelling
on the stuff generally taught under the nauseating title of "Women's
Studies" We have pieces from the perspective of a forty-something, a
thirty-something, a twenty-something, a teenager, a child and a
foetus. I've only finished the last two, so I thought I'd inflict
them on you guys. If anybody's feeling masochistic enough to beta,
I'll love you to bits.

Character: Foetus
Mood: Darkish. Lots of adjectives and incomprehensible metaphor.
Rating: PG for mood, setting and implied sex.
Feedback: Please!

Birth
By Essy

She is not yet born. She lies tightly curled, suspended in the
nourishing waters, being touched, and yet not touching. The feeling
is comforting and after she is ejected, screaming from her warm, wet
cocoon, she will spend the rest of her days seeking to recreate it.
The closeness, the contact, the care and the comfort. The enveloping
feeling of maternal love.

It pulls her almost as strongly as the suction urging her towards
that bitter cold.

As a child she will cradle her dolls and try to show them that
warmth, she will wear her heart on her sleeve and cry for her
mother's touch and though it will be given freely and often, it will
not be the touch that she craves. She will be an enigma to those
around her, drawing weird sigils in the dust with a stick, avoiding
the cracks in the pavement, refusing to sleep while the door to the
wardrobe is open the tiniest amount. She will be an object of wonder
and fear as they sense in her some primal centre, ancient, untameable
and unknowable. She will not be understood, because those around her
will not know that in her memory, fluttering around the edges of
conscious thought is the recollection of that warmth and that
closeness and a longing belief that the right words, the right
actions, the right mystical sacrifices to the wild and capricious
gods of childhood might return her to that state of calm, that
unchangeable warmth.

That aching longing is what the cold place she is being pushed
towards signifies.

She will grow with the weight of the knowledge on her back, unable to
access it. Centuries and millennia of ritual and custom will bear
down upon her, urging her towards the inevitable in the way that
every She has been urged since the first She of all. And she will
rail against these crumbing relics, with the fervour and futility of
Summer wasps trapped in syrup. She will dye her hair green and
forswear men. She will ingest all manner of toxic and wonderful
things, seeking oblivion and release from the weight. She will scream
and slice her arms until she can fool herself that she has cheated
fate and is not racing towards the glaring foregone conclusion with
such speed that her hair streams out behind her and she has to close
her eyes tight to protect them from the salty tang of the wind. She
will fill her days with sunlight and her nights with neon and
fluorescence, but in the end the darkness will provide an ineluctable
pull.

That futile rebellion is what the cold place she is being pushed
towards signifies.

The sacred memory of the warmth will lead her to seek out that
feeling of closeness and the dull faded avatar of that closeness will
lead her to recreate the warmth.

But this time...this time she will be the vessel.

She will become swollen and sweat-stained, filled with
incomprehensible emotions and unnatural cravings. She will feel the
parasite within her and the antediluvian puppeteer without. The all-
seeing, all-knowing, intangible maestro, who orchestrates her every
move as she kneels with time-honoured, breathless exactitude on the
cold bathroom floor and stains the white porcelain with her vomit.
She will weep often, without understanding why, for she has forgotten
the closeness and contentment of that place though the blood in her
veins has not and cannot comprehend the opening maw of her blood's
pulsing, agonising jealousy.

She will drive the child from within her with the force and urgency
of Jehu and gape and exult at its size and beauty and perfection and
she will never once admit that her paeans are fuelled by the tearful
release from that ugly, twisting jealousy far more than by any real
sense of jubilation at the life she has created.

That covetous anguish is what the cold place she is being pushed
towards signifies.

She will breathe her last, uncertain whether she stands on the
precipice of a glorious sliding return to that warm comfort or an
abyss into which she will fall, limbs splayed, spiralling down until
even the unconscious memory of that place is purged from her blood
and there is no warmth left to keep the cold from entering her bones.
She will gather her own around her and try not to scare them with her
fears that life was nothing but a furious race in the wrong direction
and that the finish line isn't always the proper goal. She will
tremble and fret until the eyeless stare of the puppeteer falls upon
her and she vanishes forever.

That helpless terror is what the cold place she is being pushed
towards signifies.

The suction and the pressure and the muffled shouts of "Push! PUSH!"
become all encompassing and with tears in her eyes and a howl on her
lips, she relinquishes her hold and rushes towards the cold place.

And so it will end, with a gasp of air and a startled yell and the
billing and cooing of blandishments that this is time of joy and new
beginnings.

But she knows better. She knows it has ended.

And she shivers.