Grow

"It isn't possible," Lois spoke out loud, as if verbal denial would help make the terrible reality go away. Yet she could see the fat yellow drops leaking from her breasts—and, looking closer the small bumps surrounding each nipple that hadn't been there before.

"I'm not pregnant." The reporter insisted to herself. "Lactation is just a matter of hormones. Mine must be going crazy right now. An early period and now...this. It's okay. It'll go away in a few days. Just need to...stay hydrated, take my vitamins, maybe make an appointment to renew my birth contr—"

The cramp cut off her monologue. A sense of pressure hit Lois' stomach, like the bloating that sometimes accompanied her period. Yet this was much more intense and sustained than anything she had felt before. Looking down at her abdomen, Lois could say that it certainly looked bloated...more than it had even a few minutes ago.

She placed a hand on her belly, feeling it hard and almost unyielding. The reporter couldn't remember if that was good or bad when you were sick... But she took a deep breath and calmed herself down. After all, she had just cleaned out most of the fridge. A bit of an upset stomach was probably natural, until it had all come out of her, one way or another.

Trying to ignore her sore breasts and the constant, almost painful pressure of her stomach, Lois sat back down in front of the laptop to continue her research. This time she wanted to focus on the idol itself, which still seemed to be watching her from its place on the table. She changed tactics, switching from the newspaper archives to academic articles on fertility idols and back again, cross-referencing names, dates, discoveries, exhibitions—building up, within an hour, an outline of every fertility idol that had gotten any kind of notice as it passed through Metropolis. One name came up again and again in the search, a common denominator for the past couple of years, an independent researched named Angelica Blaze...

The work would have gone faster, but the constant pain of Lois' belly was distracting to her. More than once she'd be hunched over the laptop, and then felt her belly touch the table and had to scoot back. The first time it had happened, Lois hadn't even given it any thought. Her posture wasn't always the best when she was deep into something. The second and third time brought irritation at the added distraction.

Then, pay dirt: a three-inch column on page six from earlier this year, complete with color photograph. One Angelica Blaze, at an exhibition of fertility idols, holding a very familiar stone statue in her hand. Lois drank in the gravid belly, its almost-crude whirls, the bare cleft that suggested a vulva, and studied the photo next to the idol on the table. She had no doubt that it was an exact match.

Sitting up straight, Lois leaned back...and was shocked at how far away she wa from the edge of the table. Then she looked down, and her heart skipped a beat, before catching up in a staccato flutter that brought the reporter's breath up short, pulse pounding in her temples.

Her belly was larger—arrestingly so, perhaps a couple inches past where it normally was, standing out distinctly like a little pot belly. Except it didn't look like fat. Lois staggered out of the chair, feeling a bit nauseous again...and more than that, feeling a sudden shift in balance, a twinge of pain in her lower back from the unexpected shift in weight...and the undeniable need to pee.

One hand on her bloated abdomen, Lois crossed over to the bathroom to relieve herself...and stopped, staring at her image in the mirror.

All women go through changes during the month, as hormones fluctuate, water weight is gained and lost, period comes and go. Breasts can go up or down a cup size, clothes that fit a week ago might be too tight...it was normal. What Lois was looking at in the mirror, however, was not normal. It wasn't the belly so much—that could still be passed off a a too-large meal and bloating from a period, if only just—but it was what was happening on the underside of her belly.

A thin dark line, faint but discernible, ran down from Lois' navel to just above her crotch. She knew the name for that: linea negra. Except as far as she knew, it only appeared on pregnant women. It was one of the classic signs. Lois had seen it on her mother's belly, growing longer and darker during her pregnancy with her sister Lucy.

Carefully, Lois walked over to the toilet and sat down to pee.

"Something is happening. Something unnatural." Lois breathed out, as she released her bladder. "It has to be the idol. I need help. I need...to call somebody."