They say that when you’re pregnant, fetal cells migrate through the placenta, embedding themselves into the interior fabric of you, the process a sort of colonization, the result a genetic chimera. Why this transfer happens, no one can say for certain, nor do we know the consequences of it. Probably, it doesn’t change you. Probably, it doesn’t mean a thing. Probably, it’s just an evolutionary mystery, a vestige of some ancient, forgotten time.

I remember this as I climb into bed beside my still-sleeping husband. It was a useless piece of trivia my younger sister had shared with me in lieu of congratulations when I’d told her about the pregnancy, a fact that my brain, for whatever reason, had thought fit to file away and pull out at times like this. Two in the morning times; can’t sleep, mind racing, heart pumping fast times; hair damp with sweat, skin damp and smelling of dirt and mud and the sweltering night—and in my mouth, a metallic taste, salty and ferrous, lingering.

Arjun jerks suddenly in his sleep, quaking the bed, a leg thrusting out reflexively, kneeing into me. I move closer to the edge of the mattress, or at least as close as I can to it, the alien mound of my belly precariously reaching, reaching toward the emptiness beyond. Arjun rolls to his side and creeps toward me, somnolent, closing the space between us, wrapping around me. Another incursion.

The night passes on, the wall splashed silver and yellow with moonlight and streetlight, shadows that stretch and bend and shift. Sleepless, I lay still, caught between them both, Arjun and the part of him that unfurls within me.

“This is what you wanted,” Arjun reminds me almost daily. “Why aren’t you happy? For once, won’t you even try?”

This is what I wanted, I tell myself, over and over, a lullaby, an incantation, a curse.

***

The dog is getting on my nerves again. For months now, I haven’t been able to stand the sight of it, that animal stench when it enters the room, its flop-eared, needy little face.

“Get away from me,” I tell it when I feel the wet lick of its tongue on my ankle. “Go on. Get.” But it persists, so I kick out a foot in its direction. It darts backward and scampers to a spot under Arjun’s chair. From behind his legs, it peers reproachfully at me, and I feel that familiar, ugly, seething thing surfacing, as if for air.

“Oh, she didn’t mean it, did you, Geeta?” Arjun coos. Reaching down, he pats the dog on the white patch between its ears. “She’s just feeling a little grumpy right now. A little under the weather. She still loves you.” Then, turning to me, his tone losing all of its gentleness, its patience, “You need to get yourself under control. This is too much. What are you going to do when the baby’s here, when she’s crying or hungry? Are you going to lash out at her too? What are you, a mother or a monster?”

It’s been a tense morning, my sleepless night and that persistent, insatiable hunger putting me on edge. Ignoring Arjun, I take another bite of my toast, but it tastes, as do all foods these days, like ash, charred and dusty, crumbling to nothing in my mouth. Still, I force myself to chew, to swallow it down, finish it all, because to do otherwise would inevitably lead to a lecture.

“You need to eat,” Arjun has told me repeatedly. “This is no time to worry about your figure.” Is this the lesson you’re going to teach our daughter? I know he’s thinking though he does not say. To be superficial? To be sick like you? Disordered like you? He doesn’t even know the half of it, my midnight wanderings still a mystery to him.

My stomach grumbles loudly. My hunger has been growing again, yawning cavernously. Arjun glances up from his tablet, on which he’s been reading the news. “Why don’t I get you some fruit? Some pear, or kiwi. An apple?”

“I’m not hungry,” I tell him, but I know I’m not fooling either of us. He’s already standing up from his chair and heading toward the kitchen, the dog close on his heels. I relent. “Apple. An apple sounds great,” I say.

From the kitchen, the sounds of rummaging, a cabinet door shutting, running water, and then the slice of knife through apple, the thud of it against the plastic cutting board. I picture the blade, the movements of it as it presses the skin, piercing it, then cleaves through flesh, sticky juices frothing up, coating Arjun’s fingers; in the glinting metal of the blade, the brown of Arjun’s hands, the red of the fruit.

“Here.” 

I open my eyes. Arjun’s back at the table. He places a plate in front of me, the slices of apple arranged neatly around a smear of peanut butter. 

“Eat up,” he says. 

This is his way of apologizing, of telling me he understands, that he doesn’t blame me or really mean what he said, that he doesn’t think I’m a monster.

I want it to be true.

“Thanks,” I say, and as I bite into the flesh, for a moment, I can almost believe I taste the fruit, sweetly tart, faintly honeyed, but then it, too, turns to ash.

***

It starts with this of all things: a paper cut, with my carelessly taking, as I had countless times before, my stinging finger to my mouth, sucking the drop of blood that had bubbled up to my skin. After months of nothing, of food turning mealy in my mouth, out of nowhere, a brightness, a burst of salt for the briefest of instants tingling my tastebuds to life, the jolt so unexpected and sudden that it brought tears to my eyes.

Arjun, mistaking the tears for something else, gripped my other hand, rubbed my back. “Aww, did it hurt that much?” he said.

“It didn’t. I’m not—”

“Shh, shh, shhh.” He pulled me toward him, kissed the top of my head. “It’s okay. Let it out. You’ve got a lot going on right now. It’s okay to cry.”

I was in the fifteenth week of pregnancy, still early in the second trimester. For weeks, even before the second pink line had appeared on a test, everything I’d eaten had tasted charred, turning to dust in my mouth. My stomach was a pit, my hunger unrelenting, unceasing.

“It’ll get better soon. You’ll see. It’s really common. You’re not alone in this,” everyone to whom I’d complained had reassured me. “Just wait. It’ll be like you have a new lease on life.”

“This? This is nothing. At least you’re not puking your guts out all day. At least you’re not in the ER on a continuous IV drip. I mean, if you can’t handle this, what about labor?”

“You should be grateful. You’re pregnant. So many people want what you have.” 

“Just think of what it’s all for. The little baby you’ll have at the end, your very own little miracle. You won’t even remember any of this in a few months.”

I thought that, finally, I’d turned the corner, put the worst of my symptoms behind me, the body that had grown strange becoming familiar, something I recognized, my own again. In a frenzy of optimism, for dinner that night, I ordered far too much food from my favorite restaurant in town. Papaya salad, fried tofu, massaman curry, pad see ew, mango sticky rice.

“Someone’s got their appetite back,” Arjun said as I heaped food on my plate. “Forget eating for two, you’re skipping straight to four.”

But one bite is all it took before I knew I’d misjudged things. I spat the half-chewed food out, not caring how uncivilized I was being, how childish, how pathetic.

I wept that night, and then when I was all cried out, I went on a rampage, dumping every last carton of food onto the kitchen floor, ignoring Arjun, ignoring the dog, blinded by my rage.

It was hours later before I came to myself again. I was outside, on a street I didn’t recognize, dressed only in my house sweats and the beat-up pair of running shoes I’d kept for taking the dog out or for checking the mail. The streets were empty; it was a quarter past twelve, a thin dusting of freshly fallen snow on the grass, riming bare tree limbs.

By the time I finally found my way home, it was nearly three in the morning. Arjun was asleep on the couch, all the lights still on in the house. I turned off the living room lamp and left him there. Suddenly parched, in the kitchen, I gulped down two glasses of water and was just starting to fill a third when Arjun, still drowsy, shuffled in, rubbing his neck. He remained on the other side of the kitchen, keeping the island between us.

“Thank god you’re okay,” he said. “I was so worried. I tried to follow after you, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. I thought you were—I thought you were—” His voice broke, and then he started crying, and whatever he thought I was, he never did say. 

After Arjun had fallen asleep again—this time in our bed, where I’d let him rest his head in my lap, his hand pressed to my still-soft belly—I got up to pee. It was only as I turned on the tap that I noticed the state of my hands, my mangled, broken nails, a crust of reddish black-brown beneath them, and caught in one of the lacerations, a small tuft of something soft and gray and fibrous; around my lips, a faint trace of red, barely visible at all, like the juice of fat ripe summer berries stickying my mouth. For the first time in weeks, my belly full, my hunger sated.

***

I wait until Arjun is asleep before I slip from our room. At first, my late night excursions were only occasional, once a week roaming the darkened streets of our tree-lined neighborhood, but as my belly has stretched and my hunger intensified, they’ve become more frequent, some primal, unnameable urge driving me even as my body’s new shape protests the efforts, my passage down the stairs and through the house lumbering and heavy, cumbersome, my back aching.

But as soon as I step foot outside, something comes over me, a transformation beneath the flicker of streetlights, my movements suddenly lithe and feline as I skulk down the driveway to the street, scent of grass clippings and blooming magnolias, past whirring ACs and twittering crickets, the darkened windows of our slumbering neighbors. Sometimes, a dog barks, and a light will flick on, casting a wan glow over the grass, or else a car will go past, the momentary skim of headlights over asphalt, the twin beams hazed with mist. But still I press onward into the night, undetected and undeterred.

At home again, I swish electric-blue mouthwash, scrub my hands raw beneath a stream of burning water, plumes of steam eddying up as the blood and dirt swirl and swirl and swirl, circling the drain.

Always, I go back to bed to find Arjun deeply asleep, oblivious to my absence and my return, my strange appetites.

***

In horticulture, grafting is the process of joining two different plants so they come together as one, each plant wounded then bound tight. It’s a technique frequently used in growing fruit—apples, cherries, peaches, limes—the desired fruiting scion above the nexus, the supporting root system below. A successful graft depends on many factors, including genetic proximity, compatibility, tissue alignment, proper care. Timing, too, is crucial, the grafting to be performed at such a season and physiological stage that the fruiting scion and the lower rootstock both are capable of producing a healing callus at the site of the wound. If performed correctly, grafting can improve crop yield, hardiness, drought tolerance, resistance to pests and disease.

Sometimes, though, the graft goes wrong, and a graft-chimera may arise, the rootstock’s tissues growing within the scion, the resultant fruit a morphological anomaly, like its Greek namesake, lion-headed, serpent-tailed, a conglomeration of disparate parts, a Frankenfruit. From a natural, felicitous union, something monstrous.

***

“How’s the appetite been these days?” the doctor asks at my next appointment, not looking away from the computer screen. “Eating enough?”

“Fine,” I say. “Yes. Enough.”

“I’ve been fixing her a green smoothie every morning. Got to keep those iron levels up,” Arjun offers from his usual perch in the corner of the exam room. “We’re vegetarian, so it’s a struggle sometimes, and of course, Geeta’s always had her demons. But I’m doing everything I can to support them both, Geeta and the baby. Everything I can.”

“Good, good,” the doctor says absently, his back still to us. “I’ll see you in a week.”

On our way out, the receptionist hands me a card with the time of my next appointment scrawled on it in purple ink.

“How’s our dear little passenger? Fully cooked yet? Ready to make an appearance?”

Arjun beams at her, puffing his chest with pride. “Soon. Any day now,” he says. “Any day.”

***

“Maybe you shouldn’t go out there alone anymore,” Arjun told me one morning, back around week twenty or twenty-one, as I was getting dressed for a run.

“Why not? Exercise is perfectly safe in pregnancy, even encouraged.”

“It’s not that,” he said. “Here, see for yourself.” He held his tablet out to me to show me the news story he’d just been reading. On the top of the screen, a headline read, “Rash of Animal Deaths Plagues Local Neighborhoods.” Beneath it, in slightly smaller type: “Bite Marks Suggest Possible Human Culprit.” I handed the tablet back to Arjun without reading the rest.

“If there’s some psycho out there, I’d just feel a lot better if you weren’t out there on your own,” he said.

“It’s broad daylight.”

“So? Who says he only strikes at night?”

“I’m also not a squirrel. I’m only pregnant. I’ll be perfectly fine,” I said, turning back to the mirror as I gathered up my hair, stretching a tie taut in the other hand.

“First it was squirrels and birds, then he moved on to raccoons and cats. Who knows what’s next?”

In the reflection, I watched as Arjun looked worriedly at his tablet, scrolling down to a picture of something I couldn’t quite make out. He shuddered and then, with a quick gesture, flicked the article away. The tablet screen went dark.

“They say he’s been drinking their blood. Draining them dry. What kind of monster would do something so awful?”

Once, I might have felt guilty and ashamed, worried what perilous, unspeakable paths my carnivorous proclivities might lead me down, feared that by tasting of these verboten fruits I had harmed the fetus, transferred my dependency through the cord that bound us. But I felt no compunctions, feel none now.

“A hungry one,” I said, then I put in my headphones and turned up the sound, drowning out any response Arjun might have ventured.

***

When the baby comes, wet and wrinkled and yowling, in spite of myself, I am relieved to see that she is whole and entire, a normal human specimen, unblemished by my maternal sins.

Arjun weeps joyfully when he takes her in his arms, cradles her close, kisses her fingers, her toes.

When they both fall asleep, Arjun in the chair at my side, the baby in her bassinet, I am suddenly aware that I am ravenous. In my hospital bag, I find the Tupperware container of fruit that Arjun had washed and packed as we waited for my contractions to get closer together. I pluck a grape from the bunch, bright green and firm, still beaded with tap water, lusciously plump and nearly bursting between my fingers; I part my lips, bring the grape to my mouth.

***

It is fall now, the nights chill and brooding and redolent of woodsmoke, gravestones and carved pumpkins studding neighborhood porches and lawns, Halloween ghosts and black witches’ shrouds billowing from trees. In the darkness, I hunt, my stomach soft again, the wind gusting, dead leaves gusting around me. From the bushes, I hear a rustle, and my muscles tense as I still.

Later, when I return to my room and sleeping husband, I find my infant daughter lying awake and stirring, her mouth already puckering, a wail beginning to build. I near, and she arches toward me, arms reaching, body reaching, eyes aglint with her greed.

When I lift her from her cradle, she cries as her desperation swells; within me, an answering ache. She is hungry, so very hungry, but I am her mother, and I will give her what she needs. I will nourish her.