Pregnancy/Birth Enthusiast

Addison “Addie” Turner had never wanted to be a mother. At twenty-one, her world consisted of canvas sneakers, late-night diner runs, and the kind of reckless laughter that only came from having nothing to lose. But her boyfriend, Cole, was persuasive. Not in a sweet way. In a quiet, grinding way. He wore down her refusals over cheap wine and heavy hands on her thighs. “You’d be such a good mom,” he’d murmur. “It’ll bond us forever.” Six months later, the strip of plastic turned pink, and Addie felt her entire future shrink to the size of a grain of rice on an ultrasound screen.

She was forty-one weeks and three days pregnant huge, waddling, and miserable when Cole called. “Come to my place tonight. I have a surprise.” His voice had a weird hum to it, like adrenaline. Addie assumed he’d built a bassinet or maybe set up a birthing pool. He’d been talking about home birth for weeks. Low intervention, he’d said. The way nature intended. She grabbed her hospital bag out of habit, then left it on the porch when she remembered he didn’t believe in hospitals.

Cole’s house was an old farmhouse set back from the road, surrounded by dead cornfields. The front door was unlocked. Inside, the living room was empty except for a single red-lit hallway that she’d never noticed before. She followed it, her bare feet cold on the wood, her belly leading the way.

The door at the end opened into a room that stopped her breath.

It was a converted root cellar, painted in deep burgundy and lit by industrial red lights overhead. The air smelled of latex, sweat, and something metallic—like old pennies. In a semicircle stood four high-backed birthing chairs, each one angled into a deep semi-recline. Each had leather straps at the wrists and ankles, and stirrups that forced the legs wide. The chairs faced each other, close enough that the occupants could reach out and touch toes if they tried. In the center of the circle stood a single metal cart with scissors, clamps, towels, and a fetal doppler.

Three other girls were already strapped into three of the chairs.

Addie recognized them from a distance: Jenna, who worked at the grocery store; Marisa, who’d gone to high school with her; and a girl named Kayla she’d only met once at a party. Each of them was hugely pregnant, naked from the waist down, draped in a thin sheet from the waist up. Their faces were blotchy. Jenna had been crying so long her eyes were swollen shut.

“What the fuck,” Addie whispered.

Cole stepped out from behind a curtain. He was wearing blue nitrile gloves and a laminated badge on a lanyard that said DR. COLE in sharpie. His smile was wide, proud, and absolutely empty.

“Welcome to the birthing suite, babe,” he said. “Me and the guys, we made a pact. All of us get our girls pregnant at the same time. All of you give birth on the same night. I’m the doctor.” He gestured to the empty chair. “That one’s yours.”

Addie turned to run. The door had no handle on the inside.

She fought. Of course she fought. She clawed at the doorframe until her nails split. She kicked Cole in the shin hard enough to make him grunt. But two of his friends emerged from the shadows, Derek and Matt, both grinning, both wearing cheap scrubs. They grabbed her arms and walked her backward to the last empty chair. The leather was warm and slick. They forced her into the semi-recline and buckled the straps: first her wrists, then her ankles, then a thick belt across her hips so she couldn’t lift herself.

The stirrups were cold metal crescents that hooked behind her knees and forced her legs apart and up. She was completely exposed. So were the other three girls. The chairs were angled so that every birth was visible to everyone.

“You’re all at different stages,” Cole announced, checking a clipboard. “Jenna’s been in active labor for fourteen hours. Marisa for eleven. Kayla for seven. And Addie…” He walked over, lifted her sheet, and pressed two fingers inside her without warning. She screamed. “Four centimeters. Nice and tight. This is going to take a while.”

He explained the rules in the same cheerful tone a camp counselor might use for capture the flag. No one was unstrapped until the last baby was born. No one could leave. There was no phone, no window, no clock. The only light was red, which Cole claimed was “calming for the cervix.” If anyone needed a cervical check, he’d provide it. If anyone needed to push, they’d push when their body demanded it. There would be no cutting and no tearing—Cole had read an entire online forum about perineal integrity and was determined to keep every girl “intact.” That meant slow, controlled crowning. No episiotomies. No vacuum. No forceps. Just raw, prolonged stretching.

“And if something goes really wrong,” Cole added, tapping the cart, “I have a suture kit and YouTube.”

Kayla started to sob. Jenna was already beyond tears, she was making a low, animal moan that vibrated through the floor.

Addie’s labor began in earnest within the hour. Her first contraction hit like a sledgehammer to the kidneys. She’d been having Braxton Hicks for weeks, but this was different. This was a living thing inside her, turning sideways, pressing its skull against her tailbone. She remembered reading about posterior babies, sunny-side up, and how they caused back labor that made women beg for epidurals. She had no epidural. She had a red room and a fake doctor and three other girls watching her fail.

The semi-reclined position was torture. Every contraction drove the baby’s hard occiput directly into her sacrum. She tried to lean forward, but the straps held her back. She tried to lift her hips, but the belt pinned her down. All she could do was arch her spine and scream into the red dark.

“Two centimeters in two hours,” Cole announced, checking her at what felt like midnight but could have been noon. He had no concept of time either. “Good progress, Addie. You’re really opening up.”

Across the circle, Jenna began to push. Her body had decided. There was no stopping it. Her face turned purple, and a low groan rolled out of her throat as she bore down in the chair. Her baby was also posterior, Cole had mentioned earlier that all four boys had “specifically requested” that position, believing it made for “more dramatic births.” Jenna’s perineum bulged like a water balloon. Cole knelt in front of her and held a hand mirror so she could watch herself stretch.

“Nice and slow,” he cooed. “Don’t tear. I believe in you.”

It took Jenna three hours to push the head past the crown. Three hours. Addie counted every contraction of her own while watching Jenna’s skin thin to translucent, watching the dark hair of the baby appear and retreat, appear and retreat. Jenna begged for someone to cut her. She begged for a knife, for scissors, for a jagged piece of metal. Cole just smiled and said, “You’re doing so well.”

The head finally emerged slowly, impossibly and Jenna’s vagina stretched around it like a rubber band around a grapefruit. Cole caught the baby’s shoulders one at a time, rotating the body with gentle, deliberate pulls. The rest of the infant slid out in a rush of fluid and blood. A boy. Eight pounds, twelve ounces. Jenna was shaking so hard her teeth chattered.

But the baby wasn’t crying. It was gray and limp.

Cole’s composure cracked for the first time. He rubbed the infant with a towel, then pinched its feet. Nothing. He tapped the back. Nothing. Marisa started screaming from her chair, “It’s not breathing! Do something!”

Cole fumbled for a neonatal resuscitation guide he’d printed off the internet. He gave five puffs of mouth-to-mouth while compressing the tiny chest with two fingers. After ninety seconds that felt like dying, the baby coughed and let out a thin, reedy cry. Jenna sobbed with relief. Cole looked smug again, as if he’d meant for that to happen.

Addie threw up down her own chest.

Labor slowed after that. Cole was the only person doing cervical checks, catching babies, and managing the newborns, which meant each girl’s progress was artificially stalled. He’d wander away mid-contraction to tend to a crying infant or adjust a strap. He’d forget to refill water cups. He’d let the room get cold, then hot, then cold again.

Marisa went next. Her baby was the largest, Cole had measured it via a crude tape on her belly, and her posterior labor was a bloodbath. She hemorrhaged from the sheer force of pushing against an unyielding cervix. Cole packed her with gauze and told her to keep going. She pushed for four hours. Her screams went from loud to hoarse to silent, mouth open, no sound coming out. When the head finally crowned, her labia split in three small places but not full tears, Cole noted with pride, just “skid marks.” He held pressure on each one until the bleeding stopped, then told her to push again.

The baby came out shoulders first, a shoulder dystocia that required Cole to push on Marisa’s lower abdomen while pulling the infant’s arm free. The baby was born with a brachial plexus injury, its left arm flopping useless. Cole shrugged. “Physical therapy,” he said.

Kayla’s labor was the shortest but the most psychologically brutal. Her baby was posterior and also had a nuchal hand. A little fist tucked up against its own cheek, making the head wider than it should have been. She pushed for two hours without progress, her face a mask of pure suffering, while the other three newborns cried in a laundry basket Cole had repurposed as a bassinet.

“You have to push harder,” Cole told her, as if she hadn’t been pushing until her eyes bled.

Kayla looked at Addie across the circle. Her lips formed two words: Help me.

Addie couldn’t even hold her hand.

Addie was the last. Of course she was the last. By the time Cole turned his attention to her, Jenna had been in the chair for twenty-three hours, Marisa for twenty, Kayla for sixteen. The red light had shifted from artificial to hallucinatory. Addie had stopped feeling her legs hours ago. She wasn’t even sure she still had legs.

Her baby had turned slightly during the long wait not enough to be anterior, just enough to make the labor even more inefficient. She was stalled at eight centimeters for what felt like an eternity. Cole gave her a “membrane sweep” so aggressive she saw stars, then left her to moan while he fed the other babies formula from a bottle.

The transition hit her like a car crash. One minute she was writhing through back labor, the next minute her entire body seized and she felt the baby drop. She roared a real, guttural, non-human roar and Cole came running.

“Finally,” he said, strapping on a fresh pair of gloves.

He had her lie flat on her back. Not semi-reclined anymore. Flat. The stirrups forced her knees toward her ears. Her tailbone, already bruised from hours of posterior pressure, ground into the leather. Cole put one hand on her pubic bone and told her to push.

She pushed. The baby’s head moved a millimeter. Her perineum burned like she’d sat on a hot coil.

“Don’t tear,” Cole reminded her. “I want you intact.”

She hated him so much that for a moment the hatred eclipsed the pain. She pushed again, and the head descended another millimeter. Jenna watched from her chair, her own baby sleeping on her chest. Marisa was staring at the floor. Kayla had her eyes closed.

The ring of fire was not a ring. It was a crown of thorns. Addie felt her skin stretch in ways skin was never meant to stretch. Cole had a mirror now, held at an angle so she could watch her own vulva distort around the widest part of the skull. The baby was still posterior, which meant the hardest part the forehead was coming first instead of the crown. Her pelvis felt like it was being unzipped from the inside.

“Slowly,” Cole breathed, almost reverently. “So slowly.”

She pushed for ninety minutes. Ninety minutes of burning, of screaming, of vomiting again, of begging for someone to knock her unconscious. Cole did nothing but wait and watch and occasionally apply warm compresses that did absolutely nothing. Her clitoris throbbed with referred pain. Her rectum felt like it was splitting. She was certain she was dying.

Then, with a push that tore a scream out of her she didn’t recognize as her own voice, the head passed the crown. The stretch was biblical. Cole caught the head in his palms and held it there, letting her perineum slowly, painfully, agonizingly accommodate the full circumference. He counted to thirty under his breath.

“Good,” he said. “No tears. Now the shoulders.”

One more push. The anterior shoulder lodged behind her pubic bone. Another push. Nothing. Cole reached inside, his whole hand, and rotated the baby’s torso like turning a key in a lock. Addie felt her organs shift. She pushed one final time, and the baby slid out in a gush of fluid and blood.

Her son. Posterior, sunny-side up, nine pounds even. He had a cone-shaped head and a bruise on his forehead the size of a plum. He did not cry at first, then cried so hard his whole body vibrated.

Cole placed him on Addie’s chest, skin to skin. The umbilical cord pulsed between them.

“See?” Cole said, patting her sweaty hair. “I told you you’d be a good mom.”

No one was unstrapped until the last placenta was delivered. That took another forty-five minutes. Addie’s came out in three pieces, and Cole had to sweep his fingers inside her to retrieve the fragments. She bit through her own lip.

When the final strap was unbuckled, no one stood up. They couldn’t. The four girls lay in their chairs like broken dolls, legs still in stirrups, newborns on their chests, bleeding into the red-lit silence.

Cole and his friends eventually carried them out, one by one, wrapped in stained sheets. They were driven home in the back of a pickup truck. No ambulances. No hospitals. No records.

Addie never reported it. Neither did the others. Cole had photos of them all vulnerable, screaming, exposed and he’d made it very clear what would happen if they talked.

My hormones are surging now, and without thinking, my hand goes down my pants and starts rubbing my clit for pleasure and pain relief while my puss is already beginning to bulge outwards. Now my legs are opening, partially from the ecstasy and heat between my shaking legs, and partially from my uncontrollable instincts forcing me to birth in this humiliating situation. My puss bulges even more now, obvious through my leggings that something is going on down there, and the head of my baby barely peaking out, only a spec able to be seen if I were naked. As I continue touching myself, losing myself more and more to the pleasure, my hand moves downward ever so slightly and I realize just how close I am to giving birth. “Fuck, I’m already bulging!” I whisper, just a little too loud. Bro looks over at me, confused, not making sense of what he just heard. I know I have to get out of here. I need to. I can’t give birth in front of my whole class, that would be… far too humiliating. I get up, and walk towards the bathroom, but I’ve unfortunately sat in the front of an auditorium style classroom, meaning I have to walk up the stairs to get out the doors in the back, and I can’t even close my legs. The pressure is so fucking low, so heavy. I slowly make towards the back of the room, struggling with every step. When the urge to push comes, I try as hard as I can to resist, but IMMEDIATELY fail. All I can do is stay silent and hope nobody looks at me. I hold my heaving, contracting belly with one hand and the railing for support with the other, bending over and pushing as hard as I possibly can against my will. In spite of my hoping against hope, some of the people in my class have started looking over at me. It’s extremely obvious at this point that I’m pregnant with a litter of babies, but they don’t realize I’m birthing. Except for some of the boys, that is. While some of their eyes drift down towards my ass (the feature that got these babies in my belly) they a bulge. A GROWING bulge. It’s suspiciously round… almost like… like a huge head crowning out of my puss, bulging my leggings outward more and more and MORE. Because of how tight they are though, the massive head slips back in as my contractions stop and the urge dies down. I try hard to hurry out of the classroom before another contraction comes, but they’re so close together now, and I’m so heavy and so slow. I make it near the back, where all the students who hate this class sit, ignoring the professor while scrolling on their phones. The contraction hits. This one is even stronger. I helplessly drop down to my hands and knees, painfully close to privacy, to solitude… at least for a little bit. Long enough to birth at least one of my babies. But it’s no use. Instead, I shove my hand into my panties once again and furiously rub my clit while my puss bulges obscenely into my soaked, straining leggings. The guys in the back row who notice me crowning massively into my leggings and liking it are taking pictures and videos now. I’m too busy giving birth to this huge baby some stranger put in me to even notice. Little do I know, my wish for privacy has just gone out the window. Soon, the whole school, everyone I know, and millions of strangers will have seen the viral video of me cumming while I crown into my ruined leggings, legs shaking wildly, back arched, head thrown back in pleasure. Finally, my body relents, but I’m stuck at a truly MASSIVE full crown, waddling slowly and awkwardly to the exit, finally.

I strip my clothes off. All my clothes, without thinking. I’m not thinking anymore, I’m just birthing. I can’t stop. My instincts are in control and they want me naked. I’m on all fours, completely naked, right outside the door of our classroom, and FINALLY, I can push without my leggings getting in the way. I spread my legs as wide as the can go and rub my clit some more. Instantly, with a loud, pleasurable moan, I birth the head. I move my hand further down and cup my baby’s head while they turn. “They’re so BIG!” I say to myself. But before I can think anything else, I’m pushing the even bigger shoulders out. I moan and whine, desperate to birth this baby, knowing full well that I have 2 more to go. At last, with a huge push, I finally birth the whole baby. But my next baby doesn’t want me to have any relief. Within minutes, I’m bulging massively around another head. I cup my bulging pussy, wanting to feel myself crown this time. I haven’t even opened yet and it’s already so… big. I find myself, to my shame, wishing someone would catch me now. This is private, intimate, personal… and yet… I can’t help feeling incredibly sexy. It would be so much nicer to birth for someone.

I’m going slower this time. I’m opening so very slowly around this head. My aching, bulging puss has be forced into a teardrop by now. I can’t stop tracing its shape. I’m birthing on my knees this time, so that I can use the other hand to keep rubbing. Not only does it help a ton, but it feels so damn good… All of a sudden, I hear the door swing open, and then someone’s breath hitch in their throat. Their breathing becomes fast, and heavy. I feel THEIR hand cupping my crowning puss gently as well. I let them. I move my hand and put it on top of his, letting him know I want this. I look back at him while in between pushes. A gorgeous skater boy, wearing vans, a metal band tshirt, and has long hair. He’s obviously into it. He whispers what a good boy I’m being. Tells my what an amazing job I’m doing. How perfect I look. I’m deeply embarrassed, but also… even more aroused. I let him enjoy the view as I bulge harder into his waiting hands. He gasps, ever so gently rubbing my crowning puss with one hand after noticing I was doing it while continuing to cup me. I can’t help but feel warmer, safer with his hands on me. I’m so embarrassed by it, I don’t wanna like it… but I love it. I want more. I hear him gasping and whispering in awe as I stretch and crown, just for him. He tells me what a pretty boy I am. How incredible I am. How he wants to treat me right. I can’t help myself liking it, falling for it more and more. How sweet he’s being, but at the same time, how HOT he thinks I am right now. He won’t take his hands off my most intimate parts, and I don’t want him to.

I come to a full crown in Gavin’s waiting hands. He tells me how big my baby is. How stretched out I am. How he wishes the babies were his. I can’t help myself any longer, a big urge to push comes and I quickly birth the whole baby right then. I turn around and pin him down, making out with him sloppily until I need to birth the last baby. My hands are exploring him. His hands are exploring me. His tongue is down my throat. My breath is racing. My belly is still big, and he rubs every inch of it while helping to support me so I don’t fall over. He moves his lips down to my nipple to suck it, and to both our surprises, I squirt a thick stream of milk down its throat. His eyes glass over, and he drinks even drop he can get.

We all know what’s happening in there as the restaurant brings things “up to code”. Last night the new law passed by a slim majority: 52% for. Still, it was enough, and now every female employee across the country was being subjected to this embarrassment.

Jen, who was twenty like me, and had started around the same time, flicked me a look. “Couldn’t you talk to Callum and get him to stop this madness?”

“Actually,” I said, “Callum and I broke up last night because of this madness.”

“what? Was he a supporter?! I’d never have expected it!” Jen said.

“Yeah, neither did I”, I said with a shrug. “But apparently “It just makes sense: you ladies shouldn’t need to use your brains, especially if you’ve got great tits”.”

“No way!” Jen said, “He didn’t say that!?”

“Yup. I mean, he is a Duty Managers here, at a Tooters”, I said, “I don’t think we should’ve had such high expectations of him”.

——

Fifteen minutes later, and a panting Jen excited the office, clearly looking a bit stunned. I entered.

Inside, Callum stood pantless, his cock semi hard. Mr James, the owner of the branch was seated behind his desk.

“Callum was just telling me that you two broke up,” Mr James said. “I suppose that goes to show why we need this law. You girls have no idea of commitment anymore.”

“Mr James, all due respect Sir, but obedience isn’t the same as commitment” I said.

“Gah! I don’t really care Rachel,” he said sharply. “Sit on the desk, and let’s get this over with.”

I went to his desk, and sat on it, facing Callum and the door.

Callum stepped up, “Hey Rach, so I’m gonna push in the device first, then I’ll fuck you.”

I spread my legs, and he pushed up my short black uniform skirt. As was company rules, I wasn’t wearing underwear. He pushed the small device into me. I looked up at the roof, as he used one finger to shove it in. Instantly, I was wet, the device rapidly encouraging my pussy. God, this was strange. Then he stepped between my thighs. I could feel the heat of his legs, and Callum pushed into me. I tried not to enjoy it, to be angry at him, but after a few thrusts that melted away to the joy of having him in me. He was a good Fuck. He wasn’t too interested in my contentment, moving fast and officially, I hadn’t even built up an orgasm before I felt his cock pulsing cum into me.

“all done” he said, pulling his cock out. No cum dropped out of me, the device absorbing it all.

———

if I was under any illusion that Callum was going to be fair about things, that quickly melted away. In fact, five minutes into service it melted away.

I was serving a table of rowdy guys, probably in their 30s, and one of them slapped my ass as I went to walk away with an empty. He slapped me hard, the tray wobbled, and the glass broke. I was pissed off and swore at the guy. No sooner had I walked away than Callum was beside me: “actually, we don’t treat our guests that way. I’m going to give your four weeks.”

He pulled out his phone, touched a few buttons, and instantly, the anger I felt melted, as my body flooded with hormones. It was like a heavy blanket was put over me, a warm, insulating layer. It was pleasant. I touched my abdomen, where now a polite little mound had appeared. He continued to catch me on every tiny little thing. By the end of my shift, he had me two moths along, my belly bloated and tits growing heavy. It was embarrassing- he was t pulling the other girls up or progressing them at all.

The snow began its assault on the castle just after nightfall, a howling white fist hammering against the ancient stone. By midnight, the drifts had swallowed the lower bailey, and the narrow mountain pass to the village was a memory buried under six feet of ice. The king, Alistair, stood at the window of the royal bedchamber, his breath fogging the glass. Behind him, a low, guttural moan rose from the massive four-poster bed.

Queen Jane, early thirties, her black hair plastered to her forehead with sweat, gripped the silk sheets. Her belly, enormous and taut, contracted like a fist around a scream. She had been laboring for twelve hours. The midwife, old Elara, was supposed to have arrived at noon. But the storm had laughed at horses and men alike.

“She’s not coming,” Jane said, her voice raw but carrying the iron of a woman who had survived famine, a rebellion, and three court poisonings before her twentieth birthday. “You heard the stable boy. The pass is dead.”

Alistair turned from the window, his ceremonial robes abandoned for a simple linen shirt, now soaked with his wife’s sweat and his own fear. He had commanded armies. He had looked down from the battlements as trebuchets flung fire. But the sight of Jane’s legs, slick with amniotic fluid and blood, made his stomach curdle.

“I will do it,” he said, and the words came out steadier than he felt. “Tell me what to do.”

Jane had studied the birthing scrolls. She was not a passive vessel. “First,” she panted through another wave of pain, teeth bared, “get me off this bed. Squatting. Gravity is our ally.”

He helped her lower herself to the fur rug before the roaring hearth. The heat was oppressive, but the cold beyond the window was death. Jane squatted low, her thighs burning, her hands braced on two overturned wooden stools. In this position, her pelvis tilted open like a flower. She bore down with a roar that was not a scream but a war cry.

For an hour, she pushed. Alistair knelt behind her, his hands pressed to the small of her back, feeling the monstrous power of her uterine muscles. He could see nothing but the curve of her spine and the sweat dripping from her chin onto the stones. Jane grunted, low and animal, her face purple with effort.

“I feel something,” she gasped. “It’s… it’s wrong. Alistair, look.”

He moved around to face her. Between her legs, emerging from her body, was not the familiar soft crown of a tiny skull. Instead, a rounded, fleshy mound pressed outward, split by a small, pale crevice. His heart stopped.

“The buttocks,” he whispered, horror cold as the snow outside. “The baby is breech. Feet first… no, worse. Complete breech. The buttocks are crowning.”

Jane looked down and saw it. A small, perfect bottom, the genitals swollen and tiny, wedged tightly in her pelvic rim. The baby was not sliding out. It was stuck. The skin around the baby’s anus had already turned a distressing shade of violet.

“There’s no cord,” Jane said, her mind slicing through the panic. “Check for the cord.”

Alistair reached with trembling fingers. He touched the baby’s cool, waxy flesh. He felt for the soft, rope-like coil of the umbilical cord. Nothing. It was still above, thank the old gods. But the baby was trapped, its hips too wide for Jane’s pelvic inlet. Every push Jane made only jammed the little body harder against the bone.

“It’s crowning,” Alistair said, the word foreign and obscene on his tongue. “The buttocks are crowning. Fully.”

Jane screamed then, not from pain but from frustration. She had read of this. A breech buttock presentation was a catastrophe even for skilled hands. For a king and a queen alone in a snowstorm, it was a death sentence for their child.

“You have to stretch me,” Jane ordered, her eyes wild and blazing. “Manually. Now. Before the baby’s hips lock.”

Alistair’s hands shook as he coated his fingers in the slick oil of sweet almond from the bedside table. He positioned himself between her squatting legs. “Forgive me,” he whispered to his wife, to his unborn child, to any god still listening.

He inserted two fingers into her vagina alongside the baby’s trapped bottom. Jane’s scream was primal, a tearing sound that echoed off the stone walls. He felt the ring of her cervix, swollen and rigid like a too-tight collar around the baby’s rump. With a gentleness he did not know he possessed, he pressed outward against the flesh, trying to stretch the unyielding muscle. Jane’s blood coated his fingers. She bit her own lip until it bled.

The baby did not move.

“It’s not working,” Alistair said, his voice cracking. “The buttocks are stuck. I can’t get a finger past the sacrum.”

“Oil,” Jane panted. “More oil. And change my position. The squat is failing.”

They tried oil. He poured the entire vial between her legs, soaking the rug, the baby’s purple-stained bottom sliding greasily but refusing to pass the pubic bone. He tried what the scrolls called “manual rotation,” pressing on the baby’s hip through Jane’s abdomen with one hand while the other tried to hook under the little thigh. The baby’s leg was folded, not extended, which was a sliver of mercy. But the hip itself was a stone lodged in a ring of fire.

Jane’s labor had become a thing of brutality. The contractions came one on top of another with no break, a continuous wave of crushing pressure. Her squat turned into a slump. Her legs gave way. She collapsed onto her side, sobbing, the baby’s buttocks still protruding from her body, that small purple globe mocking them both.

“The bed,” she gasped. “On my back. It’s the only position left. I know it’s worse for breech, but I cannot hold my legs anymore. We have to try.”

Alistair lifted her. She weighed nothing to him, a bundle of bone and sweat and rage. He laid her flat on the bed, on her back, head on the pillows. Her belly rose like a mountain. He propped her hips on a folded blanket, tilting her pelvis. It was the worst possible position for a natural birth, the one that narrowed the pelvic outlet and fought gravity. But Jane had no strength left to squat. No strength left to kneel.

“Pull my legs back,” she ordered. “Open me.”

He took her ankles, slick with fluid and blood, and pressed her knees toward her armpits. The baby’s bottom, still crowning, now pressed even harder against her perineum. The skin there was a thin, translucent white, stretched to the point of tearing.

“Push,” Alistair commanded, and Jane pushed.

Her face turned from red to purple to something almost black. A vein bulged at her temple. She released a sound not human, a scream that became a roar that became a howl like a wounded animal caught in a trap. Her entire body arched off the bed.

The baby’s buttocks emerged another inch. Then stopped. The vulva, stretched around the baby’s hips, began to tear at the fourchette. A thin line of blood ran down to the sheets.

“The other leg,” Alistair said desperately. “I saw it move in the squat. It’s folded at the hip. If I can reach it…”

He pushed two fingers inside Jane’s tortured body alongside the baby’s flank. He felt the tiny knee, bent. He hooked his fingertip under it and pulled. Jane’s scream was a single, sustained note of agony. The leg unlocked. It slid down, emerging from the birth canal in a gush of fluid and blood, a perfect little thigh and calf and foot, the toes curled like tiny seashells.

“One leg out,” Alistair breathed. “One more.”

He reached again, deeper this time, past the baby’s hip, past the abdomen he could feel through the thin wall of Jane’s vagina. The second knee was tucked higher. He hooked, pulled, and felt the joint give. The second leg slipped free, flopping out beside the first, dangling from the still-stuck buttocks like a broken doll’s limbs.

The baby was now hanging from Jane’s body, legs loose, but the hips and lower torso remained trapped. Jane looked down at the legs of her child, limp and bluish, and a sob tore from her chest. She thought it was dead. Alistair saw the umbilical cord, finally, pressed flat between the baby’s abdomen and the wall of the birth canal. It was still pulsing. Weakly. But pulsing.

“The baby is alive,” he lied, because he had to believe it. “But the shoulders are next. They’re wider than the hips, Jane. I have to get the arms out before the head.”

He had read one sentence about this in a forbidden medical text. To deliver a breech after the legs, you rotated the baby’s torso. You freed the arms like a magician pulling scarves from a sleeve.

He grabbed the baby’s slippery hips, his fingers sinking into the bruised flesh. He rotated the little body forty-five degrees. Jane shrieked. He rotated again. The shoulders shifted inside her. A tiny arm, folded across the baby’s chest, slid through the cervix and into the birth canal. Alistair hooked it with a finger and pulled it down. The arm emerged, followed by a hand, followed by fingers that curled reflexively around his thumb.

The second arm did not come.

It was wrapped behind the baby’s neck. A nuchal arm, the text had called it. A strangulation risk. Alistair reached into Jane’s body up to his wrist, feeling the tight, hot, flesh-on-flesh seal. He found the little elbow, bent backward. With a courage that terrified him, he pushed the baby’s torso upward slightly to create a hair’s breadth of space, then swept his finger along the arm’s length, unbending it.

The joint made a sound. A small, soft, terrible click. Jane felt it inside her and vomited onto her own chest.

The second arm came free, sliding out in a slick of mucus and blood. The baby’s torso unwound, and now, finally, the only thing still inside Jane was the head.

But the head was the largest part. And the cord, already compressed, was now wrapped loosely around the baby’s neck.

“The cord,” Jane whispered, her voice barely a breath. “Cut it.”

“I can’t. I have to deliver the head. If I cut it now, the baby bleeds. If I don’t, the head crushes it. Either way…”

He didn’t finish. He took the baby’s body in both hands, the little legs dangling, the arms limp, the buttocks still purple but now streaked with Jane’s blood. He lifted the baby upward, toward Jane’s belly, pivoting on the fulcrum of the pubic bone. The head was lodged behind it.

“Push,” he screamed. “Push with everything.”

Jane, broken and bleeding, her perineum torn to the anus, her thighs slick with oil and sweat and her own waste, gathered a breath from some deep, ancestral well of survival. She pushed.

The head descended into the birth canal. Alistair saw the dark swirl of hair on the baby’s scalp just inside Jane’s opening. He pulled downward, toward the floor, following the natural curve of the birth canal. The head crowned, the widest part stretching Jane’s torn flesh even further. She tore again, a second-degree rip running forward now, a Y-shaped gash that made her see white light.

“One more,” Alistair said, tears streaming down his face. “One more push.”

Jane screamed. The head emerged. The face was pressed against her perineum. Alistair turned the baby’s body so the chin could clear the pubic bone. He lifted the head upward, and the nose and mouth appeared, then the eyes, shut tight, then the forehead.

The entire baby slid out in a rush of fluid and blood and something that looked like dark, tarry meconium. A long, silent moment passed. The baby lay on the bloody sheets, blue-gray, limp, a boy. The cord, wrapped once around his neck, was a tight purple noose.

Alistair hooked a finger under the cord and lifted it over the baby’s head. He put his mouth over the baby’s tiny nose and blue lips. He breathed.

The baby coughed. Then coughed again. A thin, reedy cry filled the bedchamber, a sound like a cat caught in a grate. Then louder. Then a full-throated wail of outrage at the cold, the light, the brutal journey into the world.

Jane, her eyes closed, her body shaking with aftershocks, smiled a small, bloodstained smile. Alistair placed the squalling, bruised, perfect boy on her chest. The storm outside the window began to quiet. The snow fell softer now, as if the sky itself had exhausted its rage.

Charlotte clutched the metal bars of the wheelchair as she was rolled slowly down the long corridor. The uneasiness was mounting again between her thighs. She was panting rapidly hoping there was a room available in the labor ward on arrival. She could hear the nurse telling her to remain calm but the painful pressure was constantly present. Charlotte didn't know how much longer she could endure the intensity of surges.

Luckily, there was a private room waiting for her. The staff were waiting to prep Charlotte. After a brief examination, it was established she was further along than expected. The head doctor pulled back the sheets and lifted Charlotte's shaking thighs into stirrups. He told the delivery staff that there was no time to move her. She was ready to push and push hard.

"I can feel another one! Please! I need to push!" Charlotte was unsettled against the birthing table as her patience failed her. She needed to get the huge head forward as soon as possible.

The delivery doctor adjusted his mask and secured his gloves as he positioned himself at the end of the table.

"Charlotte, you are ready! The baby is ready. The enormous head is very low and already visible. Another contraction is coming now. I need a gigantic push for this massive crown. Hard pushing, Charlotte! Hard and long!"

Charlotte cried out as the delivery doctor felt for the head. She felt all the pressure explode as the contraction strongly. She pushed without direction. She bore down with loud, long grunting efforts.

"I can feel it! It....is.....so.....big! Ahhhhhhhhhh! IT....IS....SO.....HUGE! I need to.......push! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! GET IT OUT! OH THE PAIN!"

The immense crown pounded forward with her strenuous efforts. Charlotte could feel the full sensation of the entire crown stretching her so widely. Panting and pushing, she frantically tried to control her efforts. But it was coming so fast!

"IT IS COMING! CANT STOP IT! NEED TO PUSH!"

Charlotte yelled out as the intensity of the contractions slammed into her without mercy. The head doctor ordered all necessary equipment for delivery.

"She is birthing. It is huge but it is coming fast. Prepare all equipment. This baby is coming right now!"

Charlotte's cries filled the private suite for the next half an hour as she grunted and roared wildly as her baby's tremendous head forced her painfully open. Charlotte trembled and pushed with all her strength and determination.

"Another one is coming, Charlotte. Push with all of your strength. There is more crown birthing right now."

"Please.......oh oh oh oh........get it out........oh oh oh oh.......make it come........can't take it............! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH! NO! GET IT OUT OF ME!"

The crown stretched unnaturally wider at this point as Charlotte howled out the top of her lungs. She thrashed against the pillows and wildly pushed and screamed at the same time......

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! No No No! This is not right! The pain! It hurts! Too much! GET IT OUT! NOW! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

The delivery doctor supported the humongous crown as more and more of it slipped downwards and through Charlotte's opening. He nodded and encouraged Charlotte to do whatever the urges needed from her.

"I have the baby! Don't fight the need to push and birth this baby. Don't hold back Charlotte!"

Roaring louder and longer, Charlotte lost all sense of control as her body erupted into an uncontrollable birth routine. She screamed between unbridled pushing exertions. She could feel the entire head filling, pressing and pounding down and through her entrance. The blinding pain was excruciatingly unimaginable.....

the situation becomes more apparent the closer you get to the abandoned car— the engine is still running, keys still in it, and deep, throaty groans and frantic screams are drowning out the sounds of the beeping ignition

"hhhhhnnnnngggghhhh- hoo, hoo, gotta p-pushhhhhh!"

you run the rest of the way, reaching the car just as the passenger slide door slams open. the occupant of the seat has their arm draped over the headrest, nails digging into the upholstery as their other hand struggles to pull their shorts down past their hips and thighs. their head is thrown back as they roar with effort, the bulge of the emerging head making a distinct tent in the crotch of the spandex. "mmmmph, burning! o-ohhh, hooo." they inhale deeply as their belly visibly spasms. "o-ohmygod!"

"imgonnahelp," you explain in a rush, words jumbled by a mix of adrenaline and arousal. they dont acknowledge you beyond a simple nod, too busy grunting as the head begins to stretch out the area between their legs more and more.

together, the two of you manage to get their shorts down just far enough for you to see what's going on, and your eyes grow wide as you watch their lips begin to gape in earnest, turning white and bloodless around the width of the skull. "it's coming!" you announce, giving them a shaky smile as they grab behind their thigh and shove down hard.

"crowning!" they yell through gritted teeth. "hoo, hoo, h-holy fuckkk. hnnnnnng!"

"head's almost out!"

between their legs, the skull had crowned to the widest point, stretching them beyond what you had ever thought possible. you could hear the voices of help in the distance, but you werent going anywhere. fluid trickles out around the head and down the birther's legs, and you lick your lips in anticipation, eager to see what would happen next.

holding her belly while he sank his cock into her was so hot. He lived the looks and the conversations as he told people that it wasn’t his, that he was going to be doing the fathering.

Weeks later, one night, you go to sleep, you stomach cramping particular hard tonight, but you had long lost hope it could be actual contractions… And you wake up violently to a harsh, familiar tightening all across your tummy, as it misshapens in bursts that sink and stretch the skin in ways you never had seen before, but throw you into a world of agony completely unlike your first failed birth. You try to push, but you realize something heavy and monstrous is rolling inside you.

Something that is hatching, having been incubated in the warm refuge of your worm all this weeks, as if it had been laid, and isn’t all that pleased about its new, small home.

You are realizing too late. Even the signs of labor your ignored- but there is no time now, as your womb tightens and demands you to push, and you grit your teeth, sinking your hands into your aching belly and do just that. Squeezed by your overtaxed womb, the creature is guided downwards, and as it realizes finally where its path to freedom lies, its shoves its head into your pelvis with such force you feel your bones creak, and birthing fluids soak your sheets. Strangely, you don’t feel its shell, perhaps its soft, but you have no time to worry about that right now.

Another contraction envelopes you, and combined with the creature’s efforts, it begins to breach your birth canal, your pelvis creaking ominously. You scream, sweating, toes curling with effort, but you refuse to stop pushing until your body lets go off you. The babe squirms impatiently, what you guess is its tail, thick and heavy, slapping your lungs, cutting off your breath, but as another contraction takes over, you push just as hard as before, if not harder.

The first hint that this baby was trouble came long before the first contraction. Ryla, twenty years old and built like a long distance runner, lean hips, narrow pelvis, a body that had always done exactly what she asked of it, had spent the last three months of her pregnancy looking like she had swallowed a watermelon whole. Strangers in the grocery store stopped her with wide eyes. "Twins?" they would ask, and Ryla would laugh, embarrassed, her hand spread over the taut drum of her belly. "Just one," she would say. "A big one." Behind her, Theo, her fiancé, would rest his palm on the small of her back and offer a tight, professional smile. He was twenty four, a junior doctor in his final year of training, and he had already rotated through obstetrics. He knew what a big baby meant. He also knew what a posterior baby meant, sunny side up, spine against spine, the hardest way out. But Ryla wanted a home birth. She wanted quiet, candlelight, their bedroom, and no one else's hands but his. Her own parents had not spoken to her since she had announced the pregnancy at seventeen. "You have ruined your life," her mother had said, cold as ice water. Theo's parents were worse, religious and unforgiving. They had been uninvited from the wedding that was supposed to happen next spring. So it was just the two of them. Just Ryla and Theo and the enormous baby turning wrong side out inside her.

The first contraction came at two in the morning, a low, deep ache that started in her lower back and wrapped around her hips like a fist. Ryla woke with a gasp and sat up in bed, one hand pressed to her spine. Theo was awake instantly. He had been sleeping in restless bursts for a week, his medical bag packed and waiting by the dresser. "Is this it?" he asked, already reaching for her wrist to count her pulse. Ryla nodded, her breath shallow. "It feels different," she said. "It's in my back." Theo's jaw tightened. He helped her out of bed and walked her to the living room, where they had set up a birth pool that neither of them would end up using. The next twelve hours were a blur of position changes, sweat, and low, animal moaning.

Ryla spent the early hours standing. She braced her forearms against the wall, her forehead pressed to the cool plaster, her knees soft. Each contraction came like a wave of broken glass rolling up her spine. She breathed through them in long, guttural hums, low in her throat, the way Theo had taught her. But the pain did not wrap around to her belly the way it was supposed to. It stayed in her back, a hot, grinding pressure against her sacrum. Between contractions she begged him to rub her lower back, to press his palms into the base of her spine. He did, hard, using the heels of his hands in deep circles. "Harder," she gasped. "Please, Theo, harder." He pushed until his own arms burned, but nothing was enough.

By hour six, she moved to kneeling. She stacked pillows on the floor and sank onto them, her knees wide apart, her torso draped over an exercise ball. She rocked her hips in slow figure eights, trying to coax the baby to turn. Theo knelt behind her and squeezed her hips together during each contraction, a technique he had learned for posterior labor. He locked his hands over her iliac crests and pressed inward with all his strength. Ryla screamed into the ball. The pressure helped, barely, the way a bandage helps a broken leg. "It's still in my back," she sobbed. Theo did not lie to her. "I know," he said. "He is sunny side up. He might not turn."

She labored on her side next. Theo set up the bedroom like a delivery suite, sterile pads under her hips, gloves and clamps and a bulb syringe laid out on a clean towel. Ryla lay on her left side with a pillow between her knees. The contractions were coming every two minutes now, each one lasting nearly ninety seconds. She had stopped talking between them. All she could do was moan, a low, vibrating sound that rattled up from her chest. Theo checked her cervix during a brief window of calm. Eight centimeters. A lip of cervix still clinging to the baby's head. "You are almost there," he said, but his voice wavered. He could feel the position of the head through her cervix. It was posterior. The hardest part had not even begun.

She tried sitting. Theo dragged a wooden chair into the middle of the room and Ryla straddled it backward, her arms folded over the top rail, her cheek resting on her hands. Gravity was supposed to help. Nothing helped. The baby was too large and turned the wrong way. Every contraction drove his skull against the back of her pelvis, a pain so sharp and deep that she vomited a little onto the floor, a thin, bitter spurt that she barely noticed. Transition had arrived. She began to shake uncontrollably, her whole body trembling like a plucked wire. Her teeth chattered. Her legs buckled. Theo caught her before she fell and lowered her to the floor, cradling her against his chest. She was naked now, her skin slick with sweat, her hair plastered to her temples. "I can't do this," she whispered. "I can't." He held her tighter. "You are doing it," he said. "You are already doing it." She trembled in his arms for forty five minutes, unable to speak, unable to move, each contraction tearing a raw cry from her throat.

Then she felt it. The overwhelming, bone deep urge to push. It was not like the books described. It was not a gentle pressure. It was a tidal wave, a reflex that seized her whole body and bore down without her permission. "Theo," she gasped. "He's coming."

She was lying flat on her back from sheer exhaustion. Theo helped her roll onto her side again, but the pushing was ineffective there. She couldn't coordinate her muscles. The baby's head was posterior, which meant instead of a smooth curve through the birth canal, it was presenting at a wider angle, grinding against her pubic bone with every push. She pushed for an hour with no visible progress. Theo could see the head crowning slightly with each contraction, only to slip back inside when the contraction ended. "He is big," Theo said quietly. "You have to push harder than you think you can."

Ryla flipped onto her hands and knees. Kneeling, she bore down with a sound she had never made before, a deep, primal roar that came from somewhere below her lungs. The head descended. She felt the burn, the stretching, the searing ring of fire that would not end because the baby's head was not presenting at the optimal angle. She pushed until the veins stood out on her neck, until her face turned red, until she thought her heart would stop. Theo watched the perineum stretch to a terrifying degree. "I see hair," he said. "Lots of hair. Keep going."

She pushed for another hour on her knees. The head advanced millimeter by millimeter. Ryla screamed into the pillow. Theo knelt behind her, his hands steady on her hips, coaching her through each contraction. "Tuck your chin. Bear down into your bottom. Do not let up." She pushed until she saw stars, until she felt something tear deep inside, a sharp, hot pain that made her shriek. But the head stayed. It was crowning, finally, a wide oval of dark hair and swollen flesh, but it wouldn't come the rest of the way.

"I need to change positions," she sobbed. "I can't do it like this." Theo helped her shift. She ended up sitting on the floor, her back against the foot of the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest. It was not the ideal birthing position. But it was the one her body wanted. She grabbed her own thighs and pulled them back, opening her pelvis as wide as she could. Theo positioned himself between her legs, his face pale and focused.

The next contraction hit, and Ryla pushed with everything she had left. The head stretched her perineum to the point of transparency. The burning was biblical, a wall of fire that made her scream until her voice cracked. But she did not stop. She pushed through the scream. The head turned slightly, finally shifting from posterior to anterior in the last inch of the birth canal. Theo saw it happen. "Yes," he said. "Yes, he is turning. One more. One more like that."

Ryla pushed again, and the head emerged. It was enormous, the size of a small melon, and the relief was instant and horrifying. The head was out, but the body was still inside. The baby's face was turned toward her thigh, just as posterior babies often do. Theo checked quickly for a nuchal cord. There was none. "Good," he said. "Now the shoulders. Rest for a second."

There was no rest. The next contraction came ten seconds later, and Ryla pushed with a guttural howl. The anterior shoulder emerged, then stuck. Theo applied gentle downward traction, his fingers hooked under the baby's armpit. The shoulder freed itself with a wet, audible pop, and Ryla tore a little, a small second degree tear that she did not even feel because the pain was already so immense. The second shoulder was worse. It hung up behind her pubic bone, and the weight of the baby, half born, half inside, was now suspended from her perineum. The head was out, heavy and warm against her thigh, and the rest of the baby was still wedged inside her. Ryla looked down and saw her son's face, purple and waxy, his eyes squeezed shut, and she wailed. Not from pain, not entirely. From the unbearable weight of him hanging there, stuck again, his body pulling downward on the torn ring of her flesh. Tears streamed down her face. "Get him out," she begged. "Please, Theo, get him out."

Theo hooked his fingers under the second armpit and rotated the baby's body gently. "Push," he said. "Now. Hard as you can."

Ryla screamed and pushed, her whole body curling inward like a fist. The second shoulder released. The baby slid out in a rush of fluid and blood, and Theo caught him with both hands. He was huge. Long and heavy and solid, with broad shoulders and a round, perfect head that had taken twelve hours to emerge. He was not breathing at first. Theo wiped his face with a clean cloth, suctioned his mouth and nose with the bulb syringe, and rubbed his back with firm, quick circles. The baby coughed. Then he screamed, a furious, lusty cry that filled the small bedroom.

Ryla collapsed against the foot of the bed, her legs trembling, her perineum burning, her whole body shaking with the aftershock of what she had just done. Theo laid the baby on her chest, and she wrapped her arms around him, sobbing. He was slick and warm and impossibly heavy. Ten pounds, at least. Maybe eleven.

"Look at you," she whispered. "Look how big you are."

Theo pressed his forehead to hers, his hands shaking as he checked her pulse, her bleeding, the tear that would need a few stitches. Everything was fine. More than fine. She was exhausted and torn and trembling, but she was fine. The baby was fine. They were alone in their house, just the three of them, and Ryla had done it. She had pushed a sunny side up giant out of her own body with no one but the man she loved to catch him.

She looked up at Theo, her face wet with tears and sweat. "I'm never doing that again," she said.

Theo smiled, exhausted, his scrubs soaked through. "That's what you said after the first contraction."