I dedicate this to @lilycorinth , a great inspiration with her pregnancy and her writing!
You are thirty-eight weeks and four days pregnant with octuplets. The number is still absurd - a statistical near-impossibility made flesh, made your flesh, stretched and swollen beyond any reasonable limit. You cannot remember what it felt like to see your own feet, to bend at the waist, to roll over in bed without a symphony of groans and your partner's strong hands guiding you.
But these are your babies. Your eggs. Your partner's sperm. Eight tiny lives, each one a perfect fusion of the two of you, growing inside the warm, crowded cathedral of your womb.
It runs in your family, this unnatural fertility. Your own body was always prone to releasing multiple eggs each cycle, a genetic quirk that made you a walking miracle. But you didn't stop there. You pursued IVF, pumping yourself full of hormones to override even nature's generous limits. The ovarian stimulation was brutal - daily injections that left your ovaries swollen and tender, your belly bloated and aching before any baby was even conceived. But the egg retrieval yielded an astonishing number of mature eggs. Then came the fertilization, the waiting, the transfer. Eight perfect embryos took hold. Eight.
You wanted this. You wanted to be pushed to the absolute edge of what a human body could contain.
You don't know how you'll manage after they're born. Eight newborns, eight mouths to feed, eight tiny bodies to hold and bathe and love. The thought is overwhelming, terrifying, absurd. But you push it aside every time it surfaces. Right now, in this moment, all that matters is the feeling of them inside you, packed tight and growing, stretching your body to its breaking point.
The doctor had recommended reducing, selecting only two or three of the strongest. You and your partner refused. You couldn't bear the thought of losing any of them, even before they had a chance to exist. What kind of mother would choose which children live and die?
And you want to carry them to forty weeks. Full term. Complete. You want to feel every last day of this impossible burden. You want to be completely pinned down by your immense belly, unable to move, unable to rise, utterly at the mercy of the weight you carry. The thought of being so full, so stretched, so immobilized that you can do nothing but lie there and grow - it makes you wet. It makes you ache. It makes you beg your partner for more.
Now you lie propped against a mountain of pillows in the custom bed your partner had built for you, your massive belly rising before you like a planet. It is enormous. Obscenely, gloriously enormous. Your skin is stretched so taut it gleams under the soft lamplight, a roadmap of purple and silver stretch marks arcing across the globe of your abdomen. The weight of it settles low and heavy in your pelvis, spilling over your thighs, your navel a shallow crater long since flattened by the pressure from within.
The babies are restless tonight. Your babies.
You feel them shifting, eight distinct bundles of life packed tight in your overstuffed womb. There is no room for them to stretch, no space for a single limb to extend fully. They press against each other, against your organs, against the walls of your body that have become a living cage. A foot - which one, you can never tell - plants itself firmly against your right rib, and you moan, a sound that is equal parts discomfort and something darker, something pleasurable.
Your belly tightens. A Braxton-Hick, maybe, or the warning rumble of something more. The skin draws taut, hard as a drum, and you watch the topography of your own body change as a tiny heel drags across the underside, seeking purchase.
But your eyes are drawn lower, to the landscape of your stretch marks.
They are magnificent. They radiate outward from your flattened navel in concentric waves, like ripples in a pond after a stone is thrown, like tidal rings on a planet viewed from space. The ones closest to your navel are old and silver, faded to a pale white that catches the lamplight like scars on ancient marble. But as they spread outward, they change. Fresh ones, angry and purple, streak across the lower curve of your belly like lightning branches. Deep red lines, almost burgundy, trace the underside where the weight is heaviest. New ones appear every day now. You wake each morning and find a fresh purple line carved into your stretched skin, a testament to another day of growth, another day of being fuller than you were before.
You trace them with your fingers.
Your hands move slowly over the taut surface of your belly, following the paths of the stretch marks like reading a map of your own expansion. Your fingers dip into the shallow valleys where the skin has given way, rise over the ridges where it still holds. The sensation is electric. Your skin is so sensitive now, stretched so thin that every touch sends shivers through your entire body. You trace a fresh purple line from your navel down to where your belly disappears between your thighs, and you gasp at the pleasure of it.
You begin to massage your belly in slow, deliberate circles. Your palms press against the warm, drum-tight surface, feeling the curves and contours, the hard lumps that are tiny heads and backs and bottoms pressed against your walls. The pressure feels incredible - relieving and arousing at once. You moan as you work your hands over the immense globe, kneading the stretched flesh, feeling the babies shift in response to your touch.
You lift your belly with both hands, cradling its impossible weight. It is heavy, so heavy, a burden that would break a weaker person. But you hold it, feeling the full mass of eight lives resting in your palms, and the sensation sends a rush of heat straight to your core. You are so full. So impossibly, exquisitely full. You squeeze your own belly gently, feeling the firm resistance of the womb beneath, and you whimper with pleasure.
Your fingers find a new stretch mark, barely a day old, running from your navel to your hip. It is still pink, still tender. You press it gently and the skin gives slightly beneath your touch, a fresh reminder of how much you have grown. You trace it again and again, each pass sending a shiver of dark pleasure through your swollen body.
You wish you could see yourself in a mirror, see the full scope of these magnificent marks. But you cannot reach the mirror anymore. You cannot get out of bed. So you close your eyes and let your hands do the seeing, mapping every ridge and valley, every fresh purple line, every silver scar of your transformation.
More, you think. Give me more.
Yours. All yours. Conceived in a petri dish, grown in your body, and you have no idea what comes next.
You used to draw. Before this, before you became a vessel of impossible proportions, you would sit at your desk for hours, charcoal and paper spread before you, capturing the world in shades of grey. That desk still stands in the corner of the bedroom, your sketchbook still open to a half-finished landscape. You cannot sit at it anymore. Your belly would press against the edge, knocking over pencils and erasers, and the chair cannot accommodate the vast spill of your hips and thighs.
So you draw in bed now. You have a lap desk balanced on the mountain of your stomach, the paper resting on the taut curve where eight babies grow. Your belly is your table. When you draw, you feel them shifting beneath the page, their movements translating through the paper into your charcoal strokes. It makes you shiver. It makes you horny.
You draw self-portraits. You capture the impossible globe of your belly, the way it casts your thighs into shadow, the way your breasts rest heavy on its upper curve. But in your drawings, you are always bigger. You exaggerate the stretch marks into rivers, the belly into a sphere that dwarfs the rest of your body. In your drawings, you are so large that you cannot move or walk, cannot do anything but lie there and be full. Sometimes you draw yourself with your partner's hands pressed against your impossible stomach, their fingers unable to meet around its circumference, their figure behind you, obscured by your enormity.
You show the drawings to your partner. They study each one with dark, hungry eyes. "You want to be this big?" they ask, tracing the lines of your imagined belly.
"Yes," you whisper. "I want to be bigger. I want to be so big I can't move at all."
You cannot stay out of bed for long anymore. The weight is too much. Your spine aches, your pelvis throbs, your legs swell after just a few minutes upright. Your partner carries you to the bathroom and back, their arms straining with your full, colossal weight. You are too heavy for the furniture, too cumbersome for the hallways. The house has shrunk around your expanding body.
But in bed, you are free. You are a queen on your throne of pillows, your belly a mountain, your hands resting on its warm, drum-tight surface. You draw yourself even bigger. You imagine being bedbound for the final weeks, utterly helpless, utterly full, only be able to stay there and be ravaged by him.
You used to play the piano too. Before this, before you became a vessel of impossible proportions, you would sit at the keyboard for hours, your fingers dancing over the ivory. That piano still sits in the living room, a silent reminder of a body that once moved freely. Sometimes on the rare occasions you are carried past it, you reach out and your fingers brush the keys, sending a discordant jangle through the quiet house. The sound makes you stop. Makes you look down at the vast, trembling hemisphere of your stomach. You are so big that a simple act of sitting at a piano is impossible. And it makes you endlessly, shamefully horny.
You remember the last time you tried to drive. You had wanted to go to the store yourself, to feel some semblance of independence. You lowered yourself into the driver's seat, but your belly hit the steering wheel before your back even touched the seat. You couldn't reach the pedals. You couldn't turn the wheel without your stomach pressing against it. You sat there for a long moment, your enormous belly wedged between you and the dashboard, and you laughed until you cried. Then you called your partner to come move the car, and you climbed into the passenger seat instead, your belly spilling over your lap, and the heat between your legs told you exactly how you felt about being so completely incapacitated.
Your partner had to help you out of the car when you got home, their hands under your arms, and you pressed yourself against them and whispered, "Fuck me. Right now. I need to feel how full I am."
They didn't hesitate. They never do. They fucked you right there in the driveway, bent over the hood of the car, your colossal belly resting on the warm metal as they took you from behind.
Your partner is home with you every day now. They took leave from work to care for you, to watch over you, to worship every swollen inch of your body. And they don't come with gentle hesitation or worried questions. They come with hunger in their eyes, the same hunger that burns in you. They take one look at your colossal belly, at the way it consumes the bed and spills over your thighs, and they are already undressing.
"Look at you," they murmur, climbing onto the bed, their hands finding your stretched skin immediately. "Look how full you are. How many of my babies are you carrying?"
"Eight," you breathe, your voice already breaking with need.
"Eight," they repeat, and the word is reverent and filthy all at once. "And you still want more."
"Please," you beg. "I need you inside me. I need you to fill me even fuller."
They don't make you wait. They take you hard and deep, the weight of your belly pressing against their chest as they drive into you. Every thrust shakes your enormous frame, sends ripples through your taut skin, makes the babies kick and roll inside you. The sensation is overwhelming - pleasure and pressure and the constant awareness of the lives packed into your overstretched womb.
When they cum inside you, it's with a growl of pure satisfaction. "Take it," they command. "Take all of it. Let it make you even bigger."
You do. You clench around them, milking every drop, moaning as you imagine the seed finding purchase, swelling your belly to even more impossible dimensions.
In the mornings, you can hardly get out of bed. The weight of eight babies - your babies - rests in your lap, overflows your hips, makes you feel like a vessel on the verge of shattering. Every breath is shallow. Every movement is a struggle. Your partner feeds you, turns you, bathes you, and monitors you like a queen in a gilded cage.
Getting to the bathroom requires a full production now. You cannot walk at all anymore. Your partner brings a lifting sling, a specialized wheelchair, but even those groan under your weight. You are too big, too heavy. You spend almost all your time in bed, your belly rising before you like a horizon, your sketchbook balanced on its curve as you draw yourself even larger.
When the charcoal is in your hand and the paper rests on your drum-tight belly, you feel a power that transcends your immobility. You capture yourself as you are, and then you capture yourself as you want to be. In your drawings, your belly is a world. In your drawings, you are completely pinned, completely full, completely at peace with the impossible weight you carry.
You show your partner a new drawing: you at forty weeks, your belly so vast it fills the entire frame, your face peaceful, your hands resting on its surface like islands on an ocean. Below the drawing, you have written: This is what I want.
Your partner looks at the drawing. Looks at you. Looks at the swollen, magnificent reality of your body.
"You'll get there," they promise. "I'll make sure of it."
And later, when they fill you again, you feel the truth of their words.
The midwife checks your blood pressure with worried frowns. She warns of rupture, of hemorrhage, of risks that would make anyone else pale. But you don't care. Your partner doesn't care. Together, you have pushed this body to its absolute limit and beyond.
You don't know how you'll manage after they're born. You don't know if you'll have enough hands, enough money, enough sleep, enough love to go around. But right now, curled in your partner's arms, your colossal belly rising and falling with each breath, eight lives stirring inside you, you feel more powerful than you ever have in your life.
Your sketchbook lies open beside you, a self-portrait half-finished. In it, you are even bigger than you are now.
The babies kick. Your belly tightens. You moan.
It's a burden. But God, it's a pleasureful one.
