Another Birth
Leah: So… no pressure… but do you want to come to my birth party?
Jellia: What? I would love to.
Leah: Well, I know that you didn’t have them, and you told me how uncomfortable it was going to your mom’s…
Jellia: That was my ska-drek-a! And I have to make the adjustment, it will be my turn eventually… I hope!
Leah: Me too. Tell him he needs to try harder.
Jellia: He tries hard enough, thank you. So, when?
Leah: Well, any time from about four days from now. Just snip the school office and they will send out the required permissions.
Jellia: Great!
Jellia lay in bed and did her best not to wake up, but the insistent beeping would not be denied. She finally was conscious enough to realize it was her wrist comp in its bedside charger and squirmed over to look at it.
Birth Party Announcement: Leah Quinto
“Oh, oh,” she said, leaping out of bed and running to the fresher.
“What’s going on?” Gregory asked her, a few minutes later, staring at her in the water.
“It’s Leah’s birth party!”
“Oh… lonely me then,” he said, and wandered back to bed.
She dried off and then realized she hadn’t called a skimmer, went back in, called one, and went back to dress. Skirt, boots, and a heavy coat. It had been cold recently.
And then she went downstairs and outside and looked. No skimmer yet.
As she waited she thought, wonderingly, how she could not have even dreampt of imagining any of this before she had left Ephemera. The very idea of standing out here, in the middle of the night, all by herself, waiting for a called skimmer, in order to go and watch one of her friends give birth along with a few dozen other kesh. Nope. Not even something she could have imagined.
The skimmer finally came and she hopped in. A few seconds later her comp beeped and she saw it was a request to share… one of Leah’s other friends. Yes.
“Hey, Jellia,” Foonta said, when she got in, kissing sister-to-sister. “Great timing.”
Leah’s wrist beeped again, and she accepted without even looking at it, and, a block away, a kesh ran out of her house. “You for the birth party too?” she asked, jumping in. “Cousine Crenda, are you all cousines?”
“No, work friends,” Foonta said, “Ska Foonta Bartin.”
“Ska Jellia Xoff,” Jellia said, and everyone exchanged sister-to-sister
By the time the skimmer got to Leah’s house there were eight kesh, all the rest of them cousines, in the skimmer, and they were all pretty bubbly except one kesh who still seemed alseep.
The all raced to the door and the other kesh-u hesitated so Jellia opened it and went in.
They didn’t need to look far, as Leah was right in her living room, bending over a chair. “Oh, good, you arrived!” she said. “Sorry for the bad timing, but the baby just insisted.”
“Oh, silly,” Jellia said and went over and kissed, followed by the other kesh. Several of them immediatly went into the kitchen and Jellia could hear things being opened and all, but she just stayed with Leah. “Is it bad?” she asked.
“Well, I don’t have anything to compare it too, but I don’t think so. My water broke while I was asleep and, really, they don’t hurt much yet. Just kind of… tight.”
“Now, Jellia, distract me. Tell me again how they do it on Ephemera?”
“Well, the ska-drek-a calls the midwife and the midwife calls the progenitor.”
“So… she maybe hasn’t seen him in a couple of hundred days and she calls him?
“Sometimes. Sometimes he is her regular date. Maybe he is even there. Some ska-drek-a’s… I don’t want to violate code and custom but, anyway, sometimes he is already there.”
“And they each only have one? That can’t be right… come, I’m going to walk stairs again.”
Jellia walked with her up and then down the stairs. “No. I thought that was how it was, because Ska-drek-a was well off. Well, she’s still well off. Anyway, richer ska-drek-u only have on. They seem to have to have one, or it is embarassing, but they only have one. But poorer ska-drek-u have several, and rural ska-drek-u have a lot. But I didn’t know that then… I thought everyone was like Ska-drek-a. There were even people with en-drek contracts… although not like here.”
“I didn’t think it could be real,” Leah said, after a rather long pause where she looked a bit distraught. “The math just doesn’t work. If every ska-drek-a only has one kesh, then each generation will be smaller by half and pretty soon there will be no one. You can’t populate a planet that way, you can’t even live on it.”
“Hello, Daughter,” Jellia heard, and turned to see Leah’s ska-drek-a. he put Leah’s hand in her mother’s and went off to the kitchen. Jellia liked Leah’s ska-drek-a, and Leah loved her, butJellia found her a little hard to be with sometimes. And she thought this would be one of those times. Besides, the other kesh-u all needed a turn.
“Did she just get up?” Jellia asked one kesh.
“Yes, I think so. Smarter than us. She knows that nothing will really happen for a few hours yet. First birth… slow birth.”
Someone found some cards and the kesh-u soon had a game going at the table, which Jellia won, rather. She was pretty good at math and this game rewarded that.
After the game was over Jellia left and went to look for Leah. She was upstairs in a bath that was about half the size of her ska-drek-a’s at home. “Join me?” Leah asked her and, nothing really loath, Jellia got in.
“Is it better in here?” Jellia asked. “I know it was really good for Ska-drek-a.”
“It’s relaxing,” Leah said. “I think I fell asleep a few minutes ago when Clara was here with me.”
“Do you want me to rub or something?”
“No, its not posterior. Just make sure I don’t drown.”
Jellia sat there with her and she did seem to go to sleep. Eventually the water got too cold and two other kesh-u helped her out while Jellia got out myself. Jellia left her with them and went downstairs. She was going to lay down for a while and see if she could actually sleep.
When Jellia went into the living room at the bottom of the stairs the lights were out and there were kesh-u laying all over. She could still hear quiet talking from the kitchen and she had left those two kesh upstairs and of course the midwife was still watching over it all…
Jellia went and laid down too, awakening to a scream.
She sat up and looked around wildly, and then, remembering where she was, she raced upstairs.
“Not long now, Dear,” Leah’s ska-drek-a was saying, as Leah squatted in the middle of her bathroom. Three kesh, the midwife, and the ska-drek-a were there but other kesh kept coming right after Jellia.
Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!
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Von also writes as ‘Arthur Yeomans’. Under that name he writes children’s, YA, and adult fiction from a Christian perspective. His books are published by Wise Path Books and include the children’s/YA books:
The Bobtails meet the Preacher’s Kid
and
As well as GK Chesterton’s wonderful book, “What’s Wrong with the World”, for which ‘Arthur’ wrote most of the annotations.
Arthur also has a substack, and a website.
Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von