December 10, 2024
The thing about being pregnant in space is that none of your cravings can come with you.
No watermelon. No salt and vinegar ruffle-cut chips. No sour straws from the bodega. No movie theater popcorn brought home by your lover or baby daddy or whoever you can remind at the end of the day in the middle of the day when you wake up in the morning that you are pregnant and it’s their fault; up here there is no bag of wet styrofoam that costs $27 when accounting for the cost of the movie ticket they bought to get them in the door.
No, it’s just your coworker, your space husband, sheepishly offering you the last of the chocolate-flavored chalk that you have both forgotten is not actually ice cream, that you will, one day, if either of you make it out alive, think of with the same fondness and nostalgia you now hold for the real stuff, with its drip and its stickiness and how it makes you want to drink and drink from a public water fountain.
The other thing about being pregnant in space is that what you carry is already dead.
That can be just as true of Earth, to be fair. That’s why you never wanted to have a baby down there in the first place. Too many women walk around with horrors at the tips of their tongues about losing the baby or losing what happened before it was a baby or, very simply, die from having a baby. You kept a running list of facts you have learned about pregnancy and birth and childrearing that make you never ever want to have kids, a list that was 232 items long. The last one you’d added before strapping in for lift off was “fetus eats your bones.” That’s why you were so single that you could agree to go to outer space. It was hard to take the jobs of others seriously. Oh you’re a professional skier / government spy in the Balkans / inventor of Capri Sun? How fun. Me? I’m a motherfucking astronaut.
No matter how many of your bones the fetus eats, they will never grow their own.
If anyone says they wouldn’t have done what you and Space Husband did the night you found out that your eight day orbit that had lengthened into a 12 day orbit that was now being extended indefinitely though definitely not less than 40 days, they are lying. If anything, it was shocking that you waited to try having sex for as long as you did. Not because Space Husband was especially attractive; in fact, when he’d first arrived at the ISS, hours after the scheduled time, you’d been dumbstruck by how much body hair was visible even before he took off his suit.
Space is boring; at a certain point, a window is a window no matter how much of the world is outside of it. At a certain point you find out that you and a relative stranger will be sharing an aerospace craft on the edge of being blown to smithereens by an unforeseen solar typhoon. At a certain point, you can trick yourself into believing you are back in the studio apartment where you lived during your obstetrics residency, that the bunk you clip yourself to each night is no different than the lumpy mattress on the floor, that this man is just one in a series of them who will exfoliate you with their bristly bodies, instead of a potential last.
You swear Space Husband’s tooth-whitening mouthwash-tasting cum is still scattered around the place. Much like certain types of pens and your own bowels and the ability of your ova to find its way through the fallopian tube on schedule, the pull-out method is incompatible with zero gravity. Beads of jizz get caught in your keyboard like poppyseeds; Sometimes the S key stops working.
Imagine blowjob physics. Imagine doggy style where, despite not being able to grasp anything for long you still hold the pose of kneeling on empty air out of habit. Imagine a spank that carries no sound. Imagine how the dick only gets half hard because the blood doesn’t know where to go. It doesn’t matter—anything anyone else imagines about space sex is irrelevant. The only thing space sex feels like is space sex. And no one will ever know otherwise because they don’t send writers to space.
How does one grow bones in space Oteoporosis will my baby be an alien what country will my baby be from prenatal vitamins in space hould it be kicking should it be kicking oon should it be kicking by now fir t woman in space Guinness world records babie born with teeth
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Sometimes you wake up with the anxiety that they, they down there, they your faceless colleagues issuing commands from their desks in their little offices, will find out what you've done and then an extra dose of horror that there's no way that they don't already know--there are cameras everywhere here. It is like being a teenager again, but now you are smart enough to know that you aren’t slick or sneaky and the grown ups will always know exactly what you are up to. You imagine them sternly pointing to some answer on one of the psych evals you had to take, as though marking Not Very Likely At All to Feel Out of Control or Impulsive In the Face of Uncertainty while still on Earth was some sort of binding legal agreement in perpetuity. "But," you would say if you were asked, "you also did not say that the sun was so close to blowing up that we could get stuck up here doing what is effectively galactic house chores.”
Of course you can't do that. Not because you care about work politics or politeness or making a good impression on the people who had definitely watched Space Husband's pendulous balls thwack drily against your taint as you looked through a window upside down and backwards and watched the moon rise. But because sometimes they sent out radio transmissions that never seemed to arrive.
“We should start a union,” says Space Husband.
“Against who? The moon?”
He blinks.
“You'll need special care for the baby after all this; we need to make sure our insurance plan covers that."
His way of coping is to pretend that you are just suddenly pregnant while on vacation. He talks about the dangers of buying a crib second hand. about public schools in Iowa. About whether it is ethical to bring little Astra Lynne to Disney World given all the workplace violations. Never mind that he has a wife back down on earth. Never mind that due to lack of gravity, the place where a baby's brain is supposed to take root will not be able to keep a grip on a skull, which will also never develop, as per above.
The problem with being pregnant in space is that medical physics has not reached a consensus as to whether labor can begin without gravity to pull the fetus down into the birth canal. Even if something viable did take shape, it was virtually unknown whether she could survive the labor without her weakened pelvis snapping, even if there was a crack team of space OB/GYNs up here with them.
When you had sex with your space husband, you were aware of wanting two separate things to be happening at once, which is comfortingly similar to most sex you've had in your life. Even as he finally entered you after much clumsy guidance, you found yourself reaching for another version of the same moment in which you were sitting in companionable and collegial quiet, among the beeping and flashing of a control panel at rest. Maybe quizzing one another with crossword puzzles. It is not so much that you wished that Space Husband's lips were not grazing your jaw or your neck. It was more that you wished you could find a black hole in your neighborhood of the galaxy to stand in and feel both realities at the same time and the same volume and truth and delight, as though standing in a mirror’s own reflection tunnel to nowhere. It is greedy to want both; you were lucky enough to get them sequentially and shouldn’t that be enough?
You start calling the baby V.
“For Veronica?”
“Not quite.”
“Viola?”
“No.”
“Oh! Venus!”
“Ew. Horrible. I’ll just tell you, it—”
“No no I want to gue—”
“Virus. A thing alive and dead.”
He does not speak to you for the rest of the night.
Things that go bump in this endless night that is also endless day become a rhythm by which to track a pregnancy that cannot grow. You imagine an enormous baby floating outside your window, kicking its chubby legs against the walls of the craft, rolling and tumbling in an amniotic fluid of stars and gas and the smell of burning rubber. As long as your eyes are closed, you can pretend that it isn’t hail made of solar rays that are battering the walls of the craft. When they are open, you must confront the glowing red of an oxygen supply’s warning: LOW LOW LOW
And then there’s a heartbeat! It thrums! You shout it into the radio. You know you are not hysterical because Space Husband hears it too. He asks the questions a not-pregnant person should. Ground control is your ultrasound tech and he is a concerned spouse and you are both on earth and the baby has a heartbeat! Everything is okay! Even though no one down there can determine where the pulse is coming from or if it’s human or machine! Even though the ultrasound tech who is ground control who is your only tether to earth asked you to stand by and hasn’t returned.
Your space husband wants to christen whatever comes out of you. He is more religious than you would have expected for a man who had started out as a geologist, who had burrowed deeper into and flown higher above the planet than anyone else on Earth. He has taken to reading from the Russian-language Bible he’d brought with him as you both fall asleep. You’ve given up on separate bunks. It has gotten too hot for blankets. You are often naked. You now understand every naked pregnant woman you’ve witnessed through open city windows going about their naked lives like a tilting planet.
“It’s like I’m Eve and you’re Adam,” you say one night.
He pauses mid thrust into you and cocks his head thoughtfully, bumping against a light dimmer installed in the ceiling.
“Before or after the fall?” he asks into the dark.
“I think I’ve eaten the whole orchard and we’re waiting for god to let us know what the damage is.”
“I was hungry too.”
You cry for the first time in all of this. How strange. You never stopped to wonder if Adam might have been just as famished as Eve—if they stood over a kitchen sink passing the fruit back and forth until it was just a core and then they had everything and nothing for a moment before getting evicted and launched into space and having to make their way around the universe as God scrambled to create it.
In the last days you feel like a dying star. Something is pulling at your center like a wormhole. Whatever is growing there has the appetite and weight of antimatter. When you sit up you are afraid that the magnetism of it will pull your head forward into your belly button and pull you in until you are inside out. You put your hand on it. It is a familiar gesture. You had always judged other women for doing it; it was like showing off your engagement ring. Look what I have. Look at what I can do.
You wish now you could ask them if they felt the gravitational pull and were simply trying to keep themselves upright with an opposing force. There are a lot of things you wish for—you wish you hadn’t been left to die up here. You wish you could hold this half-formed thing on your hip and point to things on the other side of the glass and explain them. You wish you had any choice. You wish for an ice cream cone.
Ayla Zuraw-Friedland is a publishing worker and sometimes-writer living in Brooklyn. Her past work has been published in The Drift, EXCERPTS, The Cape Cod Poetry Review, GAY the magazine, and Publisher's Weekly.