Keeping It Interesting

Tina screamed through the towel clenched in her teeth as she felt an alligator rip at her from the inside and commence to death roll her organs. Water sloshed over the edge of the kiddie pool, onto the painter’s plastic laid over the basement floor. Steam swirled around her like some jungle movie set. Rivulets of condensation poured down the plastic walls she had put up to make this little torture chamber. She took another temperature reading, one hundred and three degrees, noting it on a nearby whiteboard. Tina sighed. How long could she sustain this? Then she screamed again, digging her fingernails into her hard, round belly and drawing blood. Goddamned Jurassic Park, she thought, and not for the first time. Life will find a way? More like life will find a way to screw you over.

Born to milqetoast hippies in the backwoods, who had birthed a litter of feral boys before her, Tina had grown up with two objectives: get rich and never have children. Being a brilliant scientist helped with both goals. She secured money from investors and used her intelligence, alongside a dash of withering wit, to ward off most of the fragile male egos she met. Only one real pregnancy scare in all those years, and even then, just a false positive. Turned out to be stage four ovarian cancer instead. At least it isn’t a kid, she’d told the doctor, then walked out the door. After a few bottles of whiskey, she decided on a new goal: to clone a new body. If only that had worked.

Tina growled through the next contraction. This thing was coming soon. She eyed the Bowie knife she had picked up at the pawn store. Not yet, she thought, there’s still a chance I might make it through this alive. Through the plastic walls, in between contractions, she glanced at a door on the other side of the room. A little pang of guilt in her heart, thinking about the dead bodies in there. She had to quit the cloning process after the sixth one died, and her connection at the crematorium started asking questions. That and a drunken re-watch of Jurassic Park had led her down a new path: gene-splicing.

She didn’t use frog DNA; she’d learned that lesson from the movie, but everything else was fair game. It had taken her months of work with a knock-off CRISPR bought on the dark web, fighting through the pain her own body was putting her through. She could feel herself fading, even getting nostalgic for the days she had to pick ticks off dogs and her brothers. One night, the room started to fade, and she thought she saw death in the corner reading last month’s Nature Magazine, scythe propped against the wall. She gave him the finger and plunged the needle into her thigh.

The next morning, Death had gone home, and the world had gone technicolor. Shades and hues she hadn’t seen outside of a nature documentary assaulted her eyes. New scents battered her olfactory senses, and the sound of her neighbors was even more excruciating than before. She ran some tests that indicated her cancer was gone. She got out her ultrasound and saw that it was all gone, all of it…except one small nodule. Tina studied it for a bit. The tiny thing seemed different than the cancer she’d gotten to know. Something new. It wasn’t more than a day before she figured out what it was. An egg.

It was coming now. She had prepared as best she could without any help. Fire burned through every nerve in her body, and now she could feel it with her fingers, smooth and rounded. As desperate to get out of her as she was to have it out. Bearing down with every contraction, the world blurred. She kept an eye out for Death. There were a few other journals near the knife, in case it had to wait a while. Scream and push. Push and scream. Bent over the edge of the pool like there was something she could pray to. Then the universe went silent. Tine felt like she’d been cut out of reality and tossed on the scrap pile. Gravity felt looser. Light seemed to be taking longer to reach her than normal. Turning inch by inch, she saw the egg sitting in the pool.

She tried to reach out and feel it. After a few tries, she brushed her fingers and felt the smooth, rubbery thing she had carried the past few weeks. Something pushed back from the inside. Tina, bleeding into the pool, scrambled for the knife. The serrated blade trembled in her hands as she tried and tried to slash open the egg, but the leathery skin was too tough. She collapsed into the warm water. Lying on her back, she saw Death standing over her. Skull cocked to the side like a curious cat, it waited to see what came next. Death always wins in the end, but it does so love when life finds a way to keep things interesting.