The Zygote 
                by

Jonathan S. Stephens

She gives it away to the squirming, parasitic, grub. It literally sucks her life out through the conduit provided it by the fleshy tap, ridden deep into her endometrial lining and driven by its unquenchable zygotic need to suckle. 

(Drain)

The fluid certainly drains from her face each day a little more, proportional to increasingly sallow skin. Her neck and head are distinctly jaundiced down the entire length of her long face and neck, mottled also by a red flush, hot like a rash and slightly raised bumps on her neck. She is narrow with pointy features, an avian quality known so well as traits from unmistakably east African. She has deep-set eyes, swallowed whole beneath the pools of dark shadow in the hollows. They shimmer ever so tenderly when she moves about in the permanent blue twilight within the apartment. Her ashy, mulatto, skin is dappled with various welts on her breasts. Her arms and legs are a veritable sea of legions, both scaly and flash magenta. They colonize her skin like refugees from a subatomic plague underway beneath her epidermal sheath. This diseased human is visible through a white lace, sheer dress, it hangs loosely over her bony shoulders. 

(The bed sheet draped over a clothesline)

She wastes away for want of food and the ravage of AIDS. The wiry strands of hair, tightly bound into a bun. She sits, and smokes, listens to the sound of her government subsidy transformed into the low drone crackle made by the heat from her lighter’s flame strike the crack pipe.

(Symbol of her life entombed in brillo and glass)

Now ushered into her lungs, where the diffuse vapor joins the growing slick of greasy residue building up from countless previous sessions. Thus, she loses interests in everything and waits restlessly. She is a disgrace even in her failures, even in her dying. 

The reaper’s presence is heavy. He dry humps her lank, bony form when she sleeps. The spectre is bestial, Greco-Roman and Fiendish and Insatiable is his carnal desire. Sex intermingled with death, that was the reaper’s coeval down through the ages, and she is now part of his age. The impish troll struck her from the record, and as he wiggled and squirmed he way into this world, she bled out of it.

The pallid thing slipped out easily, awash in slurry of mucosa, amnion and blood. This was the stew from which the papal hominid emerged, riddled with the AIDS virus. The entire slimy mass it own gelatinous life form. It looks otherworld: 

(Marshy onyx)

Tightly Wrinkled skin, a shock of kinky fluorescent orange hair, and lips larger than any man in the room where he was birthed. It has an Africanized facial structure that’s vague but recognizable. His face is scarcely human, as viewed through the tangled wreck of bones and tissues that grow askew in places they shouldn’t. All beneath a yellow cast skin that looks like a chicken fresh from the butcher. 

(Myopic)

The DNA has short-circuited. At least that has been the consensus opinion: a flood composed of booze, cocaine and nicotine. Greeted by doctors and nurses in strange, unfamiliar, uniforms. Alien creatures that have on blue gowns, and that hold long metallic implements like shiny spears. And have large eyes that look predatory and insect-like. Beneath florescent lights was the thing birthed, they cast a high sheen into the room. It reminded the OBGYN doctor of a certain place. This doctor has seen this sheen where he goes to initiate necrophilia where he teaches an anatomy class with cadavers…