C4 antho - Chamber Four

~66~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
not a single take. They did it again and again, month after
month and gave up after the money ran out. So, there’s a
spectrum of failure and success.
But for the boy and his wife, everything had been about
average, middle of the bell curve. How many eggs? 10, about
average. How many embryos? 5, about average. They had a
forty percent chance, he knew, about average, for getting
pregnant. This had made them hopeful. When his wife had
her period the next month, he took a drive out into the country
in the middle of a thunderstorm and cried, dripping tears
and snot onto the steering wheel. Now they had another
month to wait before trying again, another couple embryos
on ice.
Lying there, the boy wondered if his wife was sleeping or
deep in thought, dreaming perhaps like he often did about
their unborn children. The idea of a child was still very abstract
to the boy; he’d dreamed about his wife’s growing abdomen,
ultrasounds with bat-winged fetuses or premature
deaths. She birthed a tow-headed winged angel, triplet boys,
a body-snatcher seed pod, and once, a Popple covered in
green goo.
So the boy was surprised when his wife turned and put
her hand on his chest and played with the hair there. Her
hands were warm, supple, like the hands of a child. She
touched his stomach and the boy could feel the familiar pull
in his groin, that tingling in his penis as it became engorged
with blood. He wasn’t sure he wanted this. There was something
sad about it, desperate, like a one-night stand or a
truth-and-dare game. She touched him now in earnest and
he felt his hardness in her hand.
The boy was still reluctant. Sometimes when the boy was
very turned on he thought of calamities like burning houses
or muzzled terriers in animal shelters or dentists giving root