Aimee LaBrie’s short story, “The Fortunate Ones” is the Rumpus Prize winner for Fiction, chosen from many submissions by our judge Rachel Khong, who writes: “’The Fortunate Ones’ surprised me at every turn. It’s funny, horrifying, and striking—a story after my own heart. It takes a weird, lightly creepy fact about being female that we’re born with all the eggs we’ll ever have—and imagines something even weirder and creepier, all the while telling a story of a mother and daughter. The writing is precise and vivid and charming. I just enjoyed the hell out of reading it.”
The Fortunate Ones
My husband and I didn’t know what was wrong with our daughter Carly, just that she kept falling down and landing on her face. It would happen at any time: during communion, at the pet food aisle in Walmart, when she was walking out to check the mailbox. We thought maybe it was her blood sugar, though we argued about whether high or low blood sugar was the problem. Was she eating too many sweets or not enough?
Carly did not seem to care. She took to wearing kneepads and her bicycle helmet and not walking around in her socks because when the falling happened, she did worse when she was in socks. Her legs slid into splits.
I took Carly to her pediatrician, Dr. Lyndall. He ordered tests for Lyme’s disease, lead poisoning, pregnancy. He peered into her ears and down her throat, took blood from her arms, had her pee in a plastic cup. Everything seemed normal. She was 14 and we wondered if it was teen girl hysteria. Maybe all the girls on her volleyball team were falling over regularly.
“You know how girls can be,” my husband said, patting my arm a little too hard.
They sent her home with antibiotics for a slight ear infection.
She fell in the parking lot.
Dr. Lyndall happened to be looking through his mini blinds, and he bolted right out. “Get her back in.”
They ran more tests, ones that investigated her eyeballs, a CAT scan, an MRI, a bone density test.
“We know something is wrong, but we can’t quite pinpoint what it is. We need to keep her under surveillance for a period of time.” He was a good doctor, especially after he realized she was an unusual case. It helped that she was thin and wan and passive, like a candlestick. She had dusty blonde hair and round blue eyes. She looked like she was made of sugar cookie dough. So sweet and ordinary, I sometimes wanted to bite her like I had when she was a fat little toddler who smelled like baby powder.
A lump appeared on the MRI. Dr. Lyndall told us not to worry ahead of ourselves. It wasn’t necessarily a tumor. It was a blockage behind her left ear which affected her center of gravity. He showed us the small mass on the X-ray screen. The mass looked like the buckeyes I used to collect when I was a kid.
“We’ll have more information soon,” he said, but his eyes had a distant glassiness to them, like he was already thinking about something he had read in a medical journal or maybe an interview he might give after they found out what was wrong.
They decided to do exploratory surgery. The term reminded me of a safari. An exploration of the landscape of her body.
They don’t let regular humans in for the surgery, but from what I learned later, here’s how I imagined it occurred:
The first part went as expected: the countback with the anesthesiologist, the prepping of the surgical area, the instruments arranged just so. Dr. Lyndall made the first incision near the spot behind her ear. A dark substance squirted and hit his glasses. He was startled and asked for suction. More and more fluid poured out. It smelled strange, like kerosene mixed with coffee. Not bad necessarily, but odd. The suction slurped up much of the fluid. He asked the nurse Joseph to capture the liquid and take it immediately to the lab for testing.
When the area was clear, the doctor saw it: a small moving lump of flesh, purple colored, like a bruise. He poked it with the scalpel and the flesh drew back. He asked for a magnifying glass. He peered closer, and that’s when he saw it: the purple thing had a tiny face, small eyes, a nose, a mouth.
The nurse, Joseph, leaned in, and then he took several steps. “Holy fuck,” he said. (I imagine, I am not sure what he said). The rest of the operating staff took a look.
The conundrum then was whether to excise the mass. They could see that the creature or human had round eyeballs with lids and eyelashes. The eyes were the size of the silver sprinkles you put on top of Christmas cookies. The mouth was the size of a pinky nail, and it had a row of sharp teeth. In fact, the thing appeared to be saying something. Its mouth moved and its arms were waving around like a man discovered on a faraway planet signaling a spaceship.
Joseph said, “We need to hear what he’s saying.” He scrubbed out and ran to the nurses’ station on Wing C. He found a microphone, brought it back, and when they put it near the creature, it was clearly saying, “Get me out of her!” Not “here” but her. “Get me out of her! Please, I need to be free.”
They got X-rays and everything was done stat stat stat because maybe the creature was dying, who knew, and the X-rays showed that buried in her flesh was the rest of the body—shoulders, torso, teeny penis, two legs, bare feet. They extracted the man using a special magnifier for car accident victims with shards of glass embedded in their skin.
Joseph put the little guy on a warming table, the way you would a baby, cleaned him up with cotton balls, and all the while, the guy was talking and gesturing with his hands.
Carly, still under anesthesia, had no idea yet that her life was forever changed. The man was removed, not a bit of him harmed, and they sewed up my daughter with nineteen neat little black stitches that curled around her ear to her throat, like a ghostly boa constrictor.
My first question was whether this thing was an extension of Carly. I’d read stories about how a twin can get consumed by the other fetus in the womb. Maybe this one just lived longer or found a way to hide out in her large intestines.
I had quite a lot to learn about the human anatomy.
But it wasn’t a twin. The DNA turned out to be someone else completely, so could it be that she ate something that had a seed of this man in it, and he grew?
No one knew.
When Carly came home, she brought the man with her in a case they used for transporting rats. She had named him like she had named all our pets. Little Pete. We weren’t sure what to do with him, so I set him up in a terrarium I bought at Pet Smart. I found a burbling automatic water fountain he could both bathe in and drink from, and a heat generating lamp to keep him warm. We offered him human food, but he found it foreign, grotesque. What he really wanted was more Carly, and the day after we brought them both home, I found him gnawing away at her pinkie finger.
She confessed that she had taken a pin from my sewing kit and pricked her finger so he could taste her. “It’s okay,” Carly said. “I don’t mind.”
I had only one conversation with Little Pete. The rest of the time, I acted like I couldn’t quite hear him, which was partially true, and also I didn’t want to look at him. I had wanted grandchildren in a distant way, but not like him. He tapped on the glass of the terrarium with a bobby pin that he wielded like a sword. Tap-tap, as if using Morse code. I bent closer, my breath fogging up the glass so I had to wipe it to see his face.
I put the earbud in so I could hear what he had to say. “More to eat, please. I’m hungry.”
“Carly’s at school,” I told him.
He leaned his forehead against the glass. He wore a pair of khaki pants with red suspenders, and a shirt made for dollhouse men. He looked as if he were going to a town hall meeting or a yodeling competition. “I could have some of you.” He didn’t say this suggestively, just in a matter-of-fact way.
I thought about it. I could easily give him a toenail or a part of the callous on my foot. I could take the butcher knife I’d just sharpened to slice rutabagas for a soup and whack off the tip of my pinkie. He wouldn’t care.
I had an urge to pick him up and sprint with him to the toilet, where I could flush him down like a cat turd. So many easy ways to dispose of him while I had the chance, before things got out of hand. Why didn’t I do it? Five minutes alone with the cat and he wouldn’t have survived. A quick trip to the kitchen, whoopsie, into the garbage disposal.
I’d watched my dad kill a rat once with a spatula. He flattened it like a pancake while it squealed, its long pink tail thumping on the ground.
I imagined it would be the same with Little Pete, and though it would be easy to make it appear accidental, I worried about my conscience. I also worried that I didn’t have a moral compass at all.
Instead, I returned with a dollop of cat food with a tiny spot of ketchup on top. “Try this,” I suggested.
I set it on the dollhouse table we’d bought him, the deluxe version that could seat six of his size. He wrapped a napkin around his neck and ate with his hands. I thought he would spit it out, but he liked it just fine. Maybe that’s what we all tasted like in the end. Cat food. Bits of bones and gristle. Pig intestines. “Here’s a bit of yarn,” I said. “You can use it to tie your pants up or hang yourself.”
“Great, ” he said, his cheeks puffy with Meow Mix Chicken Liver Gravy.
Someone leaked her story to the news media. Pretty soon, we were inundated for interview requests and photos of Carly.
Little Pete went on the talk show circuit and for a while, it was funny and cute even. It turned out that he liked to wear hats and a woman in Peoria sent him hats she’d sewn for her chameleons, super small, red felt with yellow fringe around the brim. Another woman figured out how to make him clothes with snaps. They gave him a microphone for whenever he needed something. He lived in a temperature-controlled apartment. He didn’t like it when the host called it a dollhouse. “Excuse me, madam, but I am a human being,” he explained to her. But of course, that made the studio audience roar with laughter because it sounded like he said he was a human bean, which is what he resembled. An over-sized lima bean with arms and legs walking around in sombreros and cowboy hats.
It wasn’t long before Little Pete began clamoring for the rights of his other fellow “body men,” as he called them. “They’re in there! They’re fighting for their lives!”
The news teams swarmed our house. People we’d never met had opinions about Carly and the “Rights of Little Men,” as the movement became known. The same lady from Peoria fashioned a red white and blue flag outfit for Little Pete and he wore it around on his speaking tour sponsored by Mentos. He announced his determination to run for public office of some kind, though he had never been to school and only knew how to read because he absorbed it from Carly (an eighth-grade level).
A sect of people popped up who believed Carly was a gift from God, like a Christ or Virgin Mary figure. Another group insisted she was an evil anomaly, the spawn of the devil. Another claimed that it was a hoax, a fake, that Little Pete was a hologram and not a flesh and blood creature.
Then came the death threats, threats to rape her, to string her up in the trees.
I didn’t know such men existed outside of horror films.
We shielded Carly from as much of the media coverage as we could. We took away her phone and computer and put limits on what channels she could watch on TV. For the most part, she didn’t mind. She liked to read library books about horses. There was something about her that was different always, but I didn’t know if that was true or me imagining that because I had no other explanation.
We had to re-think our strategy, especially after the government became interested. They suggested we keep her under observation for her own safety, but we wondered what that would look like. Carly in a laboratory? Maybe they would want to get out all the little men and form them into some kind of army or inject them into another woman or form a series of boy bands. They would have their own television show, The Littles or The Pod Men.
We flew to Sweden in disguise, as we did not want to be recognized. Carly did not like to lie, but she understood that no one in the States had any way to help us.
The Center was pristine, all shiny black walls and burnished marble floors.
The woman who led us around spoke perfect English and wore her hair back in a eye-pulling tight bun. She took Carly’s hand. “You are safe now,” she said. She explained that she was a doctor who specialized in strange impediments, as she called it. Her name was Dr. Widerström, and she was a no-nonsense Swedish woman with square shoulders like a clothes hanger.
While Carly was getting settled in the pediatric wing, she gave my husband and me the update. “She has other pods inside her. They must be removed. They are like tumors.” (she pronounced it like “two-mores”) “When they are gone, we do a game of wait and watch.” She shook my hand, firmly, and did the same for my husband, who bowed as if we were in Japan.
Both of us were very tired, so I forgave him.
When they wheeled her out of the operating room after removing thirty more pods, she looked like she was dying. I learned later that she lost so much blood, they had to get back up transfusions flown in from a nearby hospital. The nurse who gave us the good news of her recovery was cheerful, but she had a glob of something fleshy looking on her cheek.
I didn’t want to peer too closely, in case it was permanent, but when I saw her again, the blob was gone.
In the days that followed, Carly recovered quickly. Even her sutures, and there were many—on her back, especially, but also around both of her thighs, her stomach, her left breast, the side of her neck—healed quickly, almost like time lapse still photography of fissures vanishing in the earth.
Her mood was buoyant, playful, she hugged me when I came to see her, trying not to be startled by her bald head (they shaved her hair to get another bump behind her right ear) and her monster-like stitches. The nurses brought her Swedish games to play, wooden puzzles that came without any picture to go by, so that when the pieces finally fit together, you were startled by the images: an elf-like creature dancing on a whale, a man in a banana suit playing the ukulele—none of it made sense, but by then, I had stopped trying to force the logic.
I thought we were in the clear, but Dr. Widerström asked me to take a walk with her. She said she had “not the best of news to give to you.” She cleared her throat. “There are between one and two million eggs in any human woman.”
“One or two million.” I echoed. I wondered if I should be writing this down.
“She sheds some of them every month. Her menses, are they normal?”
“I don’t know. We never talked about it. For all I know, these pods have been coming out in her period. She could’ve been flushing these guys down the toilet.”
“My guess is that only a percentage developed this way. Is there a possibility that she might have met sperm?”
I said, “No, I don’t think so.” We kept walking down the long corridor. I had it in my mind that we would continue to move through this hallway forever, that this was all part of the nightmare. “So how many eggs are left?”
“I am not sure. It could be that they will develop throughout her lifetime—half that do not reproduce and half that become…like Little Pete.”
“That doesn’t seem very exact.”
We had stopped at two double doors with a Swedish word on it. It might have read “Purgatory” for all I knew.
The Swedish doctor put her hand on my arm. “We must remove her reproductive organs.”
“She’s fourteen. If you do that, she’ll never be able to have her own children.”
“That is a truthful statement.” She stared back at me with no expression—no judgement, just accepting.
“I need to talk to Carly,” I said.
Carly was captivated by her daily life. The doctors and nurses were spoiling her, letting her spend time with the newborns in their tiny pink and blue caps. She had made a friend on the ward, a boy her age who had his own mysterious illness that made his endocrine glands produce glitter-like rivulets when he sweated.
I asked Carly what she wanted. As a little girl, she loved her baby dolls, and then she had just started babysitting for the lady down the street. She liked books when she was little that had babies in them, and she always said she thought she would like to have triplets or twins at the very least.
“I don’t know. I’ll have babies later.”
“That’s not how that works. If we do this, you won’t have babies because they will take out the part that allows you to do that, but you can adopt.”
“You mean like how we adopted the cat?”
“Yes, like that, except a baby. You could have children that way if you want.”
“I don’t want to do that.” She went back to working on her puzzle. I tried to get her to understand that if they didn’t do the surgery, more Little Petes would arrive. Again, and again and again until she was dead.
Carly seemed to go inside herself after that.
She didn’t talk, didn’t even want to see the little boy she’d met (we feared he’d die anyway), and so we left her alone.
My husband, I know, he’s nothing in this tale. He is a non-person, but what can I say? He did his best, which like most men, was not very good.
I suppose it’s a mother’s prerogative to feel like we are the true parents. She came through my body, was inside me for nine months and well before that. We are born with all the eggs we will ever have, and our mothers too, so Carly, in some form, was part of me since I was born.
I spoke to the doctor myself. I said, “Take it all out. Do it. Tell her that this is the last surgery.”
Papers were signed. Carly did not know what was happening, only that we told her that she was almost through. This would be the last surgery. My husband didn’t know what they would be taking out of her, more than the little men. I worried he would protest or offer a stupid counterpoint that I’d have to pretend to consider.
I needed this to be easy I needed just this one thing to be easy.
Carly had been a dreamy baby. She had a daisy bright face and curls that stuck up all over her head after a nap. She liked her swing, and the mobile that we set above her crib with zebra ballerinas and lions in top hats. A circus themed room, chosen by my husband whose best childhood memories were around the traveling Barnum Bailey Circus he saw every summer in Duluth. She liked Gerber peas and carrots and her first word was “kiki” for “kitty.” I went from knowing everything about her–every bowel movement, every fever, everything she put into her body, to knowing so much less–at times, I couldn’t remember the name of her eighth-grade teacher, or when the bus picked her up in the mornings.
She had gone from being an extension of me to being her own person, busy with book report deadlines, fear of track and field day at school, and a list of things she wanted for her birthday that I never in a million years would have bought her (knee length athletic socks were back in fashion that fall). She still came to me with problems, but they were mostly for how to start solving them–where could she find…when would she be old enough to…what should she tell her best friend if…The rest of her answers came from other kids or Google. Soon, she would be off into her own world, and I would know even less about her. If she survived the invasion of the little men.
I waited in the family area where they had real potted plants, plenty of out-of-date magazines, and a TV playing a show about people tearing down a giant house to replace it with a different giant house with crown molding and shiplap.
My husband wasn’t there that time. He had gone to a Swedish bakery to find the fresh rolls Carly liked; the ones that were sadly shaped like little babies wrapped in dough. I couldn’t reach him on the phone because reception was bad. I thought, I am going to be alone when they tell me that Carly has died. Just like I had been alone when my water broke with her, and when I had been alone after she was born, and my body felt like a pulsing bruise from clenching every muscle to get her out of me.
And for some reason, this realization made me feel better about death. Of course you will be alone. You are always forever alone even when someone is sitting next to you.
An hour later, the doctor appeared. “I am thinking that she will recover.” From a Swedish person, I was learning that this was high optimism.
“What did you do with the organs?” I asked her.
She turned her head to the side, quizzically, as if I were questioning her about something so obvious, she couldn’t hear me correctly. “The waste goes in the hazard bucket and is subsequently incinerated.”
“And what will you do with the…men?” This was my only qualm. They would be alive in there, maybe like Little Pete, screaming for their liberty.
She spoke slowly and clearly with barely a trace of an accent. “They will be humanely taken care of.”
I paused before asking my next question. I had read on the plane over that Swedish people find it rude if you step over their words or gesture too wildly. “What does that mean?”
“They will be treated in line with what they are. I am not sure of the word.” She opened the translation app on her phone, spoke into it in Swedish. The voice on the phone said back to me “parasite” and then “freeloader.”
“They are not genetically matched to you or your daughter, so they are like a thing that grows inside and eats the nutrients.”
“Like babies.”
“I suppose, but the baby does not multiply into other babies and feast on the host.”
We arrived at a room with many letters on it, most of them “v’s.” If you have never been to Sweden, you should know that they like their words are long and full of consonants. For instance, the word for abortion is “förkrympning.” There are three different words for murder, depending on the level of intent.
The word for mother is “mamma.”
“Where are we?”
“You are troubled by this decision, so I will show you how it works.” She whooshed open the doors with the key card she kept around her neck, and we entered a sparkling clean laboratory with bright overhead lights and a lemony clean smell. I expected to walk over to an aquarium filled with little men, climbing on each other to get out. Or a crematorium with 13 black lumps of ash.
Instead, she directed me to sit a chair. She pushed a button and a screen went up, revealing another room with a long rectangular table. On the table was a large clear glass case. “We removed 13 of them. One did not survive, but it was for the best. He had no legs and half of his cerebellum on the outside.” She pushed a button, and the lights brightened in the other room. “This is the afternoon activity.”
I leaned forward.
The men were divided into two groups. One group wore purple shirts and the other wore green. The men all looked very much like Little Pete, all middle aged with comb overs. Behind the glass, they were playing volleyball with a tiny net. A few of them wore small headbands made of terrycloth. “It is an interesting phenomenon, because they are asking to play this game and to listen to K-Pop. If they want to be on TV, this might be a way to raise money for cancer research, but that is if they wish to. We will give them the choice.”
“I thought you would exterminate them,” I said. I felt relieved, but also anxious. There were so many of them! They were an uncoordinated but enthusiastic group.
“It is fine. They are the perfect number of players for the game.” As we watched, a ball the size of a ping pong sailed across the net, hitting another man in the face. “Now, they will fight and we will have to put them away for a bit.” The men were throwing punches and squabbling but she assured me that they would get tired soon. “Then, they have a meaty snack and sleep.” She shrugged, like this was no big deal.
“You have seen this before.”
She looked up at the ceiling, considering. I looked up too. There were glowing plastic stars above us. For a moment, I felt disoriented, as if we were in an entirely different universe. “We have seen other things like this, but mostly, the girl does not survive the invasion. Your daughter is–I cannot think of the right word in English.” She smiled at me, the first time her expression changed. I realized she was younger than I first thought. She might have a family of her own. Children. A cat. She pulled up her phone again, spoke into in for the translation. The phone spoke back to me. “Lucky.” She shook her head. “This is a silly word. We say ‘lyckosam,’ the fortunate one.”
I stepped outside the hospital. It was on a hill, above the town. It was winter. The land below looked perfect, all white slopes and twinkling lights. No billboards or signs advertising things to buy. I stood in the cold without my jacket until I felt my face go numb. I wanted all of me to be numb, but I would settle for my face and fingers.
A man came out wearing a wooly shirt and what looked like a live animal on his head. As he got closer, I saw it was just a very fuzzy hat. He held a cup of steaming liquid, the curl of smoke wisping into the air and vanishing. He spoke to me in Swedish. I shook my head to tell him I did not understand. He said, “Ah.” He struggled to find the words, and then gave up. He held the cup out to me. I shook my head again. He kept his hand out. I remembered the guide book. Gifts must not be rejected. I accepted the drink.
He said, “Your daughter is Carly.”
Oh, no, I thought. He wants something from me. He knows.
He pointed to himself. “My name is Carly too.”
He waited for me to try the drink. I sipped it. “Very good.” It was. It tasted like peppermint.
“My son is the boy with the glitter. “
“I see,” I said.
“Do you know what our name means?”
“I used to know, but I’ve forgotten.”
“Free man. It is German.”
I nodded again. My fingers were warm. “Or free woman,” I added.
We stared up at the sky. Big flakes began to fall in white sheets, and I swear, they were as large as sugar cookies, each flake, huge and beautiful. I held out my hand, and he did the same. It occurred to me that we wanted the same things. To not be afraid. To take care of our children. To feel the cold of the snow and to live.
