“Seeton Mall Maternity Ward”
Emily just stared blankly at the small building that sat in the middle of the mall’s walkway. Why had she taken a picture of the maternity ward?
It was certainly one the stranger sights in Seeton Mall. A squat, white building, it housed a single maternity room right in the middle of the mall and doubled as an “educational experience”. With large windows on the sides, parents could take their kids here to teach them about how babies were born.
So why did she…
The camera!
Emily looked down at the dials on the small device and realized that while target awareness was on, she’d accidentally set user awareness to off. Could that have?
Emily raised the camera at two college aged men who were standing next to the maternity ward, staring through the window. From her own vantage point in front of the building, Emily couldn’t see inside, but from the look on their faces it was clear they were watching a woman go through a difficult labor.
Raising the camera, Emily centered it on the two men and…
*Click*
A poloriod film popped out the front and Emily stared down at it. The film slowly developed, showing the zoo’s maternity annex. The human maternity ward had been such a success that the zoo had decided to open up an educational annex of its own.
Open aired, metal tables sat in the middle of two small pens surrounded by metal fencing. A dark green alligator was strapped to one of the tables, its armored tail lifted by a leather strap attached to small crane that sat next to it, giving a perfect view of its scaly cloaca.
The alligator huffed through the oxygen mask that was tied to its snout as it weakly struggled against its bonds. Despite the copious amount of sedatives flowing through its veins, there was an obvious look of panic and confusion in its eyes as they darted around the mall.
A veterinarian in the other pen held up a small beige kit, announcing “that’s three!” before setting it down on a pillow with two other newborn kits. Next to the veterinarian, on the ground, was a fennec fox in the obvious throws of labor.
Like the alligator in the pen next to her, the fennec’s eyes were filled with terror as she loudly yipped at the veterinarian beside her. The small fox made a motion like she was trying to stand up, only to find that her rear legs weren’t working correctly. As Emily looked towards the fox’s backside, the reason for the fox’s immobility became evident – poking out from under her tail were two oversized ears, attached to the small head of the partially born kit protruding from the fennec’s vagina.
The fennec didn’t have the same view of its backside that Emily did, though with its front row ticket to the birth of her kits, she didn’t need one. The kit’s head was wedged in her overstretched vagina, while the kit’s body was filling the space inside of the fox’s hips – forcing the fox to spread her legs out to the side and locking them in place.
The former man stopped trying to rise to her new body’s feet as another contraction hit and she yelped in pain.
Emily watched as the fennec grit her teeth. But for all of the fox’s seeming effort, no more of the kit’s body emerged from the fox’s backside.
The veterinarian leaned over and examined the fennec, before rising to the small crowd gathered on the pen’s fence.
“Looks like this one is stuck. Don’t worry folks, this little fox will be fine, this just might take a bit!” the veterinarian announced.
“While we wait for Sally the Fennec to progress, lets go see if Chompy the Alligator has managed to lay her first egg!” the veterinarian said as she gestured towards the alligator in the other pen. “The ultrasound showed 43 eggs. That’s a big clutch, but she’s a big girl!”
The fennec and alligator briefly exchanged glances. Neither of them knew how or what had happened. Stuck in foreign bodies, forced to birth children that they’d never conceived, the two nonetheless understood who the other was.
Just minutes before, the alligator was an engineering student who was going to complete his masters in a few months and who had just landed a six figure job at a major tech company. The fennec, for his part, was a second year law student who was about to start an internship at the US Attorney’s Office.
Both were getting ready to start their own dream lives, but now they were both helping to bring other lives into the world. Chompy was the star exhibit in the zoo’s reptile house and would be “enjoying” a long life laying in the muck and laying eggs for the zoo’s breeding program.
Sally was a member of a less popular exhibit and was going to be moved to a smaller, regional zoo in a few weeks to make room for an expansion of the elephant area. The new zoo featured a much more spacious exhibit than her new body was used to, but she was going to be the only female in a exhibit with a half dozen males. And while Sally had never experienced an animal’s heat before, it wouldn’t be long until she entered the cycle of heat, pregnancy, and labor that would occupy the remainder of her life.
It was a stark drop down the totem pole of life that neither yet understood or was prepared for, but unless Emily decided to snap another picture of the laboring duo, it was a permanent adjustment that they were both going to have to get used to.