Sapphic Voices Science Fiction

The Mary Incident

A little girl with old, mahogany eyes and long, thick, curly hair of the same shade fluttered her lashes impatiently as she waited for her mother to lay down beside her in the prim little girl's bed of rainbow splashes and fluff.

"Ready now, Mom?" she asked.

"Okay, Hon," her mother said, as she settled in with a sigh. "Which story do you want tonight?"

Above them, a lazy ceiling fan whirred in reverse, and the faint buzz of lights was almost lost in it.

The little girl gave a decided answer. "The one about how I happened, Mom."

There was another weary sigh. "Are you sure you don't want a different one, Graciela?" the mother asked hopefully.

"No. I definitely want that one," she responded with a curt little nod.

"Alright then...Once upon a time, in 1993, there was this woman who..."

"Ate too much, drank too much, and dated too much," came the excited chorus from the little girl.

"Right," the mother said, squeezing her.

The little girl snuggled in close to wrap herself in the scented warmth that her mother exuded like a billowing cape.

"...and she was having a good old time," the mother continued, "because she didn't owe anybody anything and didn't have to answer to a single other living soul..."

"And she just believed in herself because that's all anyone can ever know anyway," the little girl recited precisely.

"Exactly. And one day after kicking that lousy Lucille out of the house," the mother said, making a twisted face at which the little girl giggled. "...the woman got very dizzy and fainted."

"She fainted on the porch, right, in just her boxer shorts," the little girl added. "And then she threw up."

"Right, she threw up after the neighbor's dog peed on her leg and woke her up. And then?" the mother prompted.

"And then she started eating a lot because she really loved Lucille a lot," the little girl responded promptly, "and so she started getting really fat."

"Yup, she sure did. She got really big, big as a boat."

"Big as a bed?" the little girl asked.

"Bigger," the mother answered.

"Big as a doctor?" she asked.

"Bigger," the mother answered.

"Big as the East Wing?" the little girl asked again, giggling lightly with delight.

"Bigger," the mother said, echoing her daughter's laughter. "She could hardly even roll down the street 'cause she was so big. And she started going kind of nuts, too, like getting really angry or crying for no reason..."

"Which was weird 'cause she was a tough cookie, right, Mom?"

"Right, she was tough like you, Little Miss Thing." The mother tweaked her nose and gave her another squeeze. "So, finally, her friend..."

"Norma," the little girl filled.

"Norma," the mother nodded, "dragged her to her doctor because she thought her thyroid was out of whack again, so the doctor ran tests. All kinds of tests, but he didn't know what was wrong. And what does a doctor do when he can't find out what's wrong?" she asked.

The little girl cleared her throat. "Bill your insurance and go get more doctors to share with," she said solemnly.

"Right. So he got more doctors, and they ran the same tests over and still couldn't find out what it was...And then one day, a skinny little nurse who had watched the doctors all this time finally spoke up..."

"Nurse Eisley. And she announced me just like Gabriel...I like her, Mom, she's my favorite," the little girl whispered, as an aside.

"Me, too, Hon...and you're right, she sounded just like an angel speaking up in the middle of all those doctors that were staring down at the lady, and she said..."

"Well, I think she's preggers," the little girl trumpeted, mimicking Nurse Eisley's nasal twang.

"And they all shut up for about two seconds before they busted out laughing, and, they all, including the lady, laughed at Nurse Eisley for ten minutes. And then one of those big, old doctors said...what?"

"He said, 'Are you kidding, she's a lesbian'," the little girl boomed.

"He sure did, and after they all laughed again, they decided to run the tests one more time. Finally, one of them told Nurse Eisley to do a pregnancy test on the sly, and guess what the answer was?" she asked.

"It was: Yesss!" the little girl hissed, pumping her bent elbow and clenched fist up and down, triumphantly.

The mother laughed in warm, clean notes. "Yes, it was, so the doctors all piled in the room and told the lady...and she fainted again. Well...when she woke up, they started asking all sorts of questions, like, 'Well, aren't you a lesbian?' and she said she was..."

"One-hundred percent," the little girl sang out.

"And, 'So, was the man just a one-night stand, then?'" the mother mimicked with a whine.

The little girl recited, diligently, "And she said, 'Yes, but that was three years ago in college, when I was experimenting,'"

"Uh-huh, and then they asked her if she was sure she had never been raped, and she said..."

"'I think I'd notice,'" the little girl answered, on cue.

The mother continued the story. "But still, nobody believed her because in their religion, there's an answer for everything and everything needs to be answered, and they worship a god called ..." she prompted again.

The little girl thought for a moment. "Oh, yeah: Norman."

The mother chuckled, then cupped a hand to her mouth and whispered in her daughter's ear. "Uh-uh: Norrrrrmal."

"Oh, right. And that's why everyone started calling her Mary...but, Mom, I don't remember why on that part," the little girl whispered in her mother's ear.

"That's okay. Remember the story I told you about that other lady that got pregnant without a man? Her name was Mary, see?" her mother explained with a smile. "Well, they finally let her go home, but she had to take other tests that all pregnant women have to have, no matter how they got pregnant," the mother continued.

"Yeah, a amnosentences and a sonargram, and you got to see me when I was making you fat, right, Mom?" the little girl piped in, looking up into the reflection of her mother's face.

"I sure did, Sweetie."

"And my hair was as long as it is right now, and my eyes were open, and I was waving," the little girl recited proudly.

"Yup, you sure were," the mother laughed. "Nurse Eisley ran to get the doctors to show them, and all they said was for me to stop eating spicy foods."

The little girl interrupted the story. "I think I remember that, Mom...Is that why I like pepper?"

"Could be, Baby...Let's see...but then they brought her to the hospital again because something was wrong with the baby's tests. They said that you had two sets of my genes and that that was..."

"I-M-P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E!" the little girl chimed in emphatically. "My chromezomes are screwy," she informed her mother.

"Right, but apparently it wasn't, 'cause you did," the mother nodded. "And your chromosomes are not screwy, they're just different."

"And then Nurse Eisley said that the Greek gods used to do it all the time, and why couldn't a nineties' woman, right?"

"Right." The mother leaned down until their noses were touching, tip to tip, and they were looking directly into each other's eyes. "And then, Hon, you came out," she said.

"After a miraculously short labor, right?"

"Uh-huh...And they took one look at you, and they finally believed me," the mother said, a warm smile erasing the tired lines that had deepened her face.

"Because I looked exactly like you," the little girl finished, the same smile playing faintly on her lips as her eyes began to droop.

"You sure did, Baby," the mother agreed, holding her miracle tight, and rocking gently until her little one was securely asleep. She brushed a strand of her own mahogany hair---long, thick and curly---from eyes of the same shade to look down at her miniature.

"And now they're trying to make me do it again..." the mother breathed out with a troubled sigh.

"Excuse me...time to report back to your room," came the electronic voice in an attempted whisper, wrenching the mother's gaze from her dreaming daughter up to the observation window in the high, blank wall.

With a resentful frown, she nodded and slipped out of the bed carefully. She lifted a rainbow of wires, gently, to squeeze a kiss onto her daughter's forehead between the patches that adhered them to her. She stole away from the bed, an island of color and frill and demented sanity in an expanse of overpowering whiteness. As she left the large, perennially lit room, she strained to close the heavy door without waking her daughter. Nurse Eisley joined her in the walk across the hall to her own room, attaching the monitors as the mother crawled slowly into bed.

A burly man in a white lab coat ran his ID card through the scanner by the door. "You know, it's amazing how similar their dreams are even though we've been monitoring the little one continuously since birth. I just don't see how she can know some of those things," he said as he pulled the thick metal door open so he and two of his colleagues could enter. "There's a possibility that inherited memory accompanies this type of mutation. Either that or ESP," he chuckled.

"Well, let's not forget the homosexuality issue, gentlemen," another said. "We may finally have our chance to see if that gene really does exist. And if it does...well, it's just a matter of isolating it, now, isn't it?" he said with a smug grin.

The man in the third white lab coat only nodded knowingly, jingling the change in his pocket as he went. It rang throughout the corridor.

They walked briskly to the observation room as the door marked "PARTHENOGENETICS" closed behind them with a muted boom. It was followed, instantly, by the peal of automatic locks sealing it.

If you have enjoyed Sonia C. Barrera's "The Mary Incident", then please be certain to e-mail her at  s_barrera[at]hotmail.com  and thank her for posting this Story.

Click here for a list of all of Sonia C. Barrera's  Stories and Poetry at  Sapphic Voices Authoresses.