Seung hyun stares at a poster posted on the muted mint green wall. It wasn’t his first time seeing the poster, but he had never given its previous displayed duplicates more than a passing glance. But now he was staring at it, not with great scrutiny, but still with weirdly mounting apprehension. It was cartoonish and had the paisley colourings of a cartoon. A cartoon, a two-dimensional representative, non- to semi-realistic visual art. Now, Seung hyun was a fan of art and of cartoon’s in general, he thinks himself a realist, most of the time. But right now, he wonders why he has this feelings of discomfort, of very mild squeamishness, of very faint dread.

He stares at the title of this duplicated, questionable, informative art work. Pregnancy and Birth.

Sandara joins him in his speculation, back from the washroom, dressed in a hospital gown, a lighter shade of mint green with white polka dots on it. She gave Seung hyun’s foot a nudge from her own slippered foot.

“Yah. If you’re so freaked out about this you shouldn’t have come.”

Seung hyun frowns at her, gives her a slow, well-enunciated, “I am not freaked out.” which was an obvious tell, at least to Sandara, that he was lying. For some reason, Seung hyun has a tendency to talk a breath slower when he’s nervous. Sandara wonders if that was weird, or if her noticing was infinitely weirder.

Seung hyun’s eyes moves back at the poster, stares at the inverted child suspended by a large fleshy tube wrapped in veins of poster blue, and poster red. Its eyes closed to the invisible slick amniotic fluid. Its head almost making up half of its body; it’s legs contorted to a fetal position, which would be extremely logical because… well… It is a fetus.

He really shouldn’t have watched those documentaries of child birth. That was absolutely one of the worst decision he has made in his life.

…and the mother was a headless apparition, grotesquely halved as a cross section, her organs only slightly identifiable. Her , a composition of milk ducts and globules of fat cells.

Seung hyun briefly thinks of how much he likes gore and zombie movies, briefly thinks this poster was some form of promotion of the horrors of pregnancy and child birth. He tries to stop this thinking because he knew Dara really wanted the baby, and he just got over his slight, rather unmanly apprehension about a crying poop-monster, but now he, after a bad decision of midnight entertainment, sees his child as some parasitic alien growth that would emerge from Sandara’s vulva in its bloody, slimy, mucotic glory.

For a moment, Seung hyun grows a bit queasy. He wonders if morning sickness was contagious.

Sandara sighs and makes a grab for his shades, revealing red eyes and dark circles. “If you wanted you could have just stayed in and got yourself some sleep.”

Seung hyun just stared at her. “I can’t let you go with this alone.” He says, like a line delivered to a brother at arms, to person you chose to die with.

Sandara smacks him on the arm, “Yah, stop treating my pregnancy like a death sentence!”
He flinches and rubs his arm. He doesn’t complain, doesn’t say anything more. Well, what exactly do you say to a person with a parasitic growth inside her. He gets a flick between the brow and a stomp on his toes and Dara earns a rewarding ”Ow!” from her stupid best friend.

“Why did you watch those stupid documentaries, if it scares you this much?!”

“I am not scared!” Seung hyun reiterates. He is just a touch worried. Just a touch. He had watched those things to appease himself from feeling guilty of seeing her puke twice just hours of coming home: first at his pictorial shoot, secondly after she had her first unsuccessful dinner.

It was just last night, she just looked so tired, and defeated, and he could just crouch beside her, rubbing her back, holding her hair. He felt absolutely helpless at her bent form, at the sound of her gagging, at her teary eyes that greets him just as she flushes her vomit down the toilet.

She would shyly tell him, “Sorry,” like she did something wrong or disgusting and he wanted to tell her it’s fine and hug her, but for some reason he never does. Then, he would receive a weak smile as she tucks her hair behind an ear and tell him, “Thank you,” like she knew that he wanted to help and comfort her and just the sentiment made her feel better.

So, he was watching her intently as she nibbled on noncommittally on her pizza. He finds it slightly amusing that she confessed that it was the only thing that she actually enjoyed the past few weeks. And she described to him the difficulties she had, stacked with her ever consistent, all day nausea— sleeplessness, anorexia, anxiety. She knew it wasn’t all because she was pregnant. It was partially because she was constantly under stress. She told him she felt like a bad mother, being unable to take care of her kid living inside her, and consequently became emotional and Seung hyun could not imagine feeling worse. So he had held her and let her cry, told her she wasn’t a horrible mother, told her to give herself some slack, told her she needed to nicer to herself because stressing herself out is bad for their baby.

Seung hyun felt extremely bad even after she had dozed off on his chest, those stray beads of her tears on her lashes made him feel even worse if possible. He gives her soft kisses on each of her closed lids, tasting the saline of her despair. He knew he could not share her pains, but he thought that he could empathize, if he knew more about it. So as she slept beside him on her couch, snuggling close to the blanket he had carefully tucked her in, he watched a string of documentaries about pregnancy and birth.

It wasn’t his fault that he was consequently freaked out by watching women getting their cut open