While Daph flipped idly through channels – wondering why she still paid for basic cable – the baby stirred inside her. Tugging up her loose shirt, she scratched the itchy side of her belly and let her hand remain there, gently drumming her fingers as the baby made similar motions from beneath. Skipping over clusters of news channels, her finger hesitated as the television landed on a children’s network, that was currently showing some bizarre, over-saturated nightmare of colors and shapes that made Daph’s eyes hurt. The baby – they were hovering between the names Madeleine, Hazel, or Nell – wiggled and stretched in the confines of the womb, seemingly in response to the music coming from the TV.

“Is thith gonna be your thing?” Daph asked, frowning at the screen. “We gonna need to get you t-shirts and backpackth of…whatever the fuck thith is?”
Maddy-Hazel-Nell turned over, kicking out both of her feet against Daph’s palm.
“Don’t gimme that. If you like it, it’th whatever. I’m just not lookin’ forward to having shit like thith playin’ on the TV all the time.”
Frowning, she balanced the remote atop her bump and folded her arms.
“And what happenth when I wanna watch thomethin’ with blood and gutth? Do I gotta put you to bed? It’d probably fuck you up if you thaw some horror movie too young, wouldn’t it?”

Daph sat up, rubbing her lower back, and glanced around the room, looking with new eyes at all the things that could fall on or collapse under the weight of a baby that, inevitably, will learn to climb before she walks.
“Holy fuck, thith place is a death trap,” she said, holding her belly as if to pull it closer to her. “As thoon as you’re outta me, you’re goin’ in a cage until we can get some of thith shit nailed down.”
Feeling peckish, Daph hauled herself up from the couch and shuffled into the kitchen, her shirt still bunched atop her bare belly as the baby inside it led the way. With a jar of peanut butter in hand, she started poking around the cabinets, looking for something to slather it on. The jar had her name written on it in Sharpie, above two larger words: DON’T TOUCH.

“Oh, and another thing,” she continued to Maddy-Hazel-Nell, “what the hell are we gonna feed you? Baby food creepth me out. I bet it’th full of all kinds of chemicalth and shit. Holly might know better about it. Might be better to keep you on all-natural thtuff til-”
Blinking, Daph raised her eyebrows as a realization struck her. With her free hand, she cupped one of her sensitive, growing breasts in her hand, bouncing it. “Oh shit, I gotta breastfeed you, don’t I? Like, the whole time. Least until you got teeth. Pleathe don’t be born with teeth.”

Settling on her usual snack – peanut butter and popcorn – Daph returned to the couch and her indentation in the cushions. The baby, sharing her mother’s hunger, seemed just as excited in anticipation of food. Using her finger, Daph scooped a dollop of peanut butter onto her tongue and enjoyed smacking it off the roof of her mouth.

“It’th weird,” she said to herself. Between her lisp and the peanut butter, her voice would’ve been incomprehensible to anyone else. “You aren’t the firtht kid I’ve had. I thpent half my twenties pregnant, so thith ain’t anything new to me. But I’ve never had to worry about all thith other shit before.”
With another dollop of peanut butter, she smeared it on a handful of popcorn and shoved the entire mass in her mouth. Daph kept talking around it.
“But it’th kinda like…a good worry, too. It feelth kinda nice to be worried about all thith stuff. It maketh me all excited.”
After wiping her fingers on her shirt, Daph moved her hand to her belly and stroked the underside, feeling the growing baby inside her shift and turn into a comfortable position.

“The difference,” she said, “ith that, this time, you’re mine.”
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