When Dom first started working at the hospital, it was hard to see the men come in and go into one of the rooms, pull the curtain, and know what was happening to the unconscious bed against her will. But he was in charge of signing them in as a part of his floor manager duties at Wake Med, so he couldn’t look away. Not when he was scanning IDs and tracking number of visits and which bed—because that’s how they referred to them, never women; that word had been stricken from the vernacular and pulled from dictionaries long ago. Dom scanned and typed and pointed out room numbers while he tried to keep his eyes on the floor. He tried to ignore the excitement on their faces when they walked in and the sweat they wiped from their foreheads on the way out. He tried not to hear the squeaks of the beds or picture the bodies in them. He tried not to think about the smallish ones brought in from the farms once they reached puberty, and how many of them had become the beds in the rooms around him. He closed his eyes and remembered the time before, then took a deep breath and got back to work.
Tracking was important because when one of the beds became plus one, as they called it, the men had to be notified. Some of them were interested and wanted to know when the child was born, and if it was a boy when the paternity testing was completed. Dom was happy his job included plenty of paperwork and phone calls when he stood at the counter and watched the movement on the floor: the other medics moving in and out of rooms with tubs of warm water and sponges, piles of dirty sheets and towels on carts, stacks of clean hospital gowns that opened in the front, and the snap of latex gloves going on as they went about their work. It was strange and uneasy how quickly he’d grown accustomed to a world without women, how they all had, even as the forbidden word stuck in his brain. Every squeak of a footstep throughout the hospital, every throat clearing, every laugh or sneeze, every voice on the other end of the phone all belonged to a man. When the change first came he was glad that his mother didn’t live long enough to be taken and hooked up to machines, relieved he didn’t have a sister to be unconscious and touched by men she didn’t know. But now he couldn’t remember the feeling. Just like he couldn’t remember the sound of his mother’s voice or the clear line between right and wrong. Everything had gone quiet and blurry. It was so easy to go along.
We are caged twenty hours a day: six girls per cell, twenty-five cells per building, and ten buildings per farm. They give us four hours outside every day in the fenced pen with a mesh tent that cuts the sky into boxes of blue and white and traps the heat, despite the fans and the occasional gusts of natural wind. We are encouraged to move and play during outside time. “Taut muscles make better beds,” the farmers say when they come to fill up our feed trays and change out the water. We run wild within our confinement: laps at the edge of the fence, circles in our cages, we climb the mesh until we reach the center and hang from the sides of the chain link with just our toes—count how long we can hold on. We know we must use our bodies while we can, train them for a chance at escape. The farmers don’t bother with raising us to be docile. “That’s what the needle is for,” they say.
We are separated into different barns by age and we can hear the babies screaming through the night, four buildings away. We wonder how the farmers sleep through the cries. We wonder why no one brings them bottles or comforts them in the dark. We wonder why we don’t remember our time in the baby barns. Our memories start here, in these pre-teen cages, and we all know this is where the memories will end. So we make the most of the time we have now and try to hold off our periods with hope and sheer will, beg our bodies not to change. The cages are cramped and hot and sometimes they make us howl like the wild animals we are, high, piercing screams that work their way through all the barns until we are a chorus of wild girls in pain. The cages are terror, but they are the terror we know. We see the vans drive away, the girls who are no longer girls inside, pressing their bodies against the windows, eyes begging. The unknown is worse. It is the end.
One thing that hadn’t changed in the new world was the social hierarchy. The men at the bottom were the men who didn’t have any connections or much education and they were the ones who did the most work. The grunt work. Janitors kept the hospital shiny and sanitized but medical workers like Dom were in charge of keeping the beds clean, which really meant the bodies in them. When Dom had to rotate onto bed-work as part of his floor manager duties, he took his time with the sponge. He made sure the soapy water stayed warm, even though the beds weren’t conscious to notice the difference and he’d seen goosebumps break out on their flesh when he was changing sheets and no sounds came from their lips. He used smooth strokes and thought of them all like the babies in the nursery wing. “Gentle touch,” he remembered his mother saying to his little brother whenever he put his hands on something or someone else. Gentle. He repeated the word in his head while he wiped and rubbed and squeezed the water out of the sponge. He focused intently, especially on the ones his own age who were often forgotten and moved down a ward once the fertility had run out. Up the calf, behind the knee, along the inner thigh; he was careful and thorough. It was better him than some of the others, like Russel, who confided mid-sponging that he wanted to work his way onto the higher lists, and reap the benefits of his work. And that he already knew which bed he wanted to visit. He spent extra time on her. Dom hadn’t known how to respond, so he’d just looked up and blinked, but later he couldn’t keep his lunch down and his stomach raged against food for hours.
Dom lived without affection, which was maybe more difficult than living without sex—though he was used to the absence of both. He barely remembered the touch of his mother’s hands on his face, the feel of her arms around him, but he held on to the slight glimpse he had. Visiting a bed couldn’t replicate that human touch, he knew, so he never put his name on a list. He didn’t want it. The desire was only there when he was alone and it was a desire that could never be met by a bed; he wanted a warm breath in his face, conscious fingers on his flesh, desire reciprocated with a soft voice like the one that haunted the back of his mind. So he took care of his own longings and avoided the beds outside of work. What he really missed was connection, the kind he couldn’t get from his friendships alone. Sometimes he looked at the men in love with each other and wished for that feeling in his own chest, that smile on his own face, that hand laced with his. Sometimes, when he was willing to admit it, he was envious when he looked at the men leaving the beds—that satisfied softness to their faces—even though he didn’t understand how they could feel intimacy with a body that couldn’t feel it back. What he wanted didn’t exist in this world anymore, so he let his desire fade away and focused on making it through each day. Paperwork and patient care, his life narrowed down to four words.
Once the beds were confirmed plus one they moved them to the gestation ward; the men didn’t like to see the round bellies when they walked into the room for their turn at a bed, and even with the curtain pulled the shadow of a mound in the background ruined the experience, they said. So the hospital set up another wing—it was easier that way, too. The proper machines were set up to track growth and watch vital signs, and as medics, they all knew what to keep an eye out for: if a penis was spotted in-utero, the bed was moved to the male gestation room where the lighting was better and the machines were newer. “Precious cargo,” the men said to each other as they wheeled the beds down the hall and onto the elevator. “Have to look out for the little guys.”
Dom was good at his job and ran the floor well, as long as no one who remembered the before slipped up and called anyone nurses. Feminine sounding titles had been replaced across the board, but a few were hard to shake, like nurse and teacher. Especially from the mouths of men in higher positions who’d never had to worry about being misnamed: doctors and lawyers and chairmen. Those men still looked down on the men below them, maybe more so now that there weren’t women around to take the contempt and hatred; laying slack in the beds, the feelings slid right off. Those men didn’t like the idea of sharing the beds either, so they set up another layer of exclusivity—they took the tens and made them into the VIP section. Only men of power had access to the bodies that had once been models and actresses or looked like they had; names and professions had been erased from the medical histories so no one noticed the neuroscientists and engineers mixed in. None of the men welcomed the competition they felt among each other, but it was certainly better than when they had to compete with women as well. The older ones like him, who remembered the before, often thought about that, they told him, and shook their heads as they unzipped and climbed onto the beds.
We watch another van drive away with a load of us inside and we begin making plans. We may be caged and trapped but we don’t have to make it easy for them. We grow our nails out and sharpen them to points on the wooden fences that keep us in; we pull bits of wire and wood from the structures around us, hunt for dropped paper clips and stray pens after the medics come to examine our bodies for signs of puberty. We store homemade weaponry under our itchy wool blankets and learn to pick the locks on our cages, arms squeezed through the chain link and wrists bent at odd angles. We roam the buildings at night looking for anything to help in battle, digging holes and creating cracks in windows to the outside, increasing our stamina and muscle mass, learning to live without sleep. We run and we jump and we climb; we become warriors, we become the monsters they want us to fear, we’re the ones who go bump in the night.
We attack when they least expect it; they don’t see us coming. The farmers lock the gates behind them so we use that to our advantage—we trap them in with us and we strike. We punch and we stab, we kick and we bite and we scratch. We holler our piercing screams and the men let go of our arms to cover their ears. That’s when we go in for the soft middle of their bodies. We create havoc and violence with our girl fists and claws, with our girl voices and anger; we see the panic in their eyes. We are winning. We tear and push and rage. The men slam into fences and crack the wood, their bodies land against the mesh and when we work in groups of three or four it is enough weight to rip open the sky.
When the guards make it out to us, the men are broken and bloody and girls are running free, smashing through weakened wood and shattering glass. They round up the many they can and lock us down with handcuffs and chains, talking about ways to make the cages tighter and more secure, ways to make us behave, they say. But we feel strong and victorious even in our chains. Some of us broke free. There are girls out there now, running and breathing on their own. They can make it out, we are sure. Our legs are strong and fast and our will is greater than theirs. And word of our fight will reach the other farms, the other girls in other cages. Girls will know it is possible. We can be free. We can rise up.
Dom often met his friend Hector for lunch for a change of scenery. Hector ran Labor and Delivery and was in charge of the transition to the separate nurseries, located on opposite sides of the building. Dom and Hector stood at the desk, looked through takeout menus, and watched the everyday commotion out of the corners of their eyes. The newborn boys were sent to the busy side of the hospital so they would have plenty of admirers through the glass and the unclaimed ones would be picked up by other men. None were left fatherless—the staff made sure of it when they bathed and powdered them and covered the building in cute pictures. Not everyone loved a newborn, but most couldn’t pass up an infant who grabbed their finger and cooed in a way that sounded like “dada” wasn’t too far off. Especially not the ones who could afford in-home help now that there were plenty of jobs for the young men straight out of high school. Infant instructors and home managers were as affordable as nannies and housekeepers had been in the before, even though there was more respect for the work and the title now. Advertisers called it the work of real men—safeguarding the future.
The female newborns were stored in a quiet hall at the end of the mid-level wing until they were healthy enough to move to the farms. There weren’t many visitors so the medics could monitor more beds and cradles, overlapping between adults and nursery. It was a sweet gig, really. Hector said he was envious every time he took over a new load. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the excitement and surgical aspect of L and D,” he said between bites of his ham sandwich, “But the peace and quiet really calls out whenever I step off that elevator.” He told Dom that the floor manager got to spend as much time on the crosswords as he did making shift schedules and filling out the tracking forms—which were never full, the lucky bastard. Working in the quiet wing meant he didn’t have to deal with the assholes who visited the nines and tens or the sheer the number of men in the beds rated five to eight, and the endless paperwork that went along with that, like Dom did. But it was all better than the chaos and danger that came with the ones and twos and their visitors: the ones who got rough with the beds, the rowdy drunks, the nervous first timers counting change out of their pockets. Dom liked his position just fine, all considered.
Things ran smoothly throughout the country: hospitals, schools, boardrooms, homes, and even the prisons had a calm that was easy to feel when Dom had gone to visit his brother inside. Even as word of the uprisings on the girl farms became a common topic of conversation, no one worried about what it might mean. “They should transition them sooner,” Hector said when he told Dom about the latest news. “Get ‘em in the beds before they can rebel.”
Another medic from L and D leaned onto the counter. “Too early and the elasticity and muscle tone is off,” he said. “Guys would notice the difference in the beds.”
“Guess the risk is worth the ripening,” Hector said and laughed.
Dom attempted to nod and not look horrified while they talked about the number of girls who had died trying to escape and those who the farm had deemed too dangerous and had to put down. He didn’t take pleasure from the conversation, but he needed friends. There were only so many battles he could fight on any given day and this wasn’t going to be one of them.
It was the rest of the world that didn’t share the same view of the new ways. In the beginning there was outcry, there was anger, and there were protests around the globe. When international humiliation and a well-implemented boycott wasn’t enough to bring a bill before congress, let alone open the floor for discussion, the U.N. levied sanctions. Trade slowed to a trickle, with only India and Russia willing—and only in secret. Even everyday items became expensive and hard to find, let alone the particular tastes like the right stuffed olives for a martini. Difficult, but not impossible. Like most policies, the wealthy had a workaround and it was the men who worked for them who suffered. Still, they weren’t willing to go back either. They talked about it at drinks after their long shifts. Life was already tough and they were already poor, at least now they had something to show for it. Someone to hold it over, they meant, but no one said that out loud; they could walk into any hospital and have access to a bed, to a body that had to just lie there and take it. They had power. That was enough.
We are being punished, but there is only so much they can do. They take away one hour of our outside time; any more than that and the muscle tone would suffer, the medics say. They tell the farmers they’ll have to find ways to control us that don’t harm production so they increase the stocking density and we now live with ten girls per cage instead of six. More to resist any fight, they think, but we grow stronger the tighter we are packed together. Windows are bolted and covered with bars, drones are sent into the air to patrol the sky beyond the mesh, and they remove all blankets and forbid all shoes. They are afraid. They should be. The more they take away from us, the stronger the fight inside us becomes. Our bones harden, calluses form on our heels and toes, and our nails shape themselves into claws without any need for sharpening. Our bodies breed for a battle. We know it is coming. We can hear it in the wind.
The hospital still had access to supplies, they just had to be spread a little wider and used a little more sparingly. Do more with less was the motto. Dom had grown up with those words on his mother’s lips so he knew how to make it work. He swallowed a knot in his throat the first time his chief all but shouted it like a chant at their department meeting—the irony of the average woman’s words being used against womankind was hard to miss. He hadn’t let himself miss his mother because it was too hard to think about, not knowing exactly how she’d died, where she’d been buried, if she’d been buried at all. Sometimes it was his mother’s body he saw in the beds. Her hair that fell flat against the pillow and her fingers that bled if he cut the nails down too far. Dom pushed the thoughts of her from his mind and refocused on the task in front of him.
He checked the tubes and changed out the IV bag, recorded all of the necessary numbers in the chart at the foot of the bed. He had never known the name of the body in the thin cotton gown before her name was replaced with a number. He’d never seen her eyes open on their own, never heard her speak. The tug he felt in his chest couldn’t have been personal, the flutter in his gut when he leaned too close and smelled the humanity under all the antiseptic. He stood too fast and had to hold on to the wall for balance; he blinked and took deep breaths. This wasn’t his idea, this world. He’d had nothing to do with it and there wasn’t any choice but to go along and do his job—those who argued just ended up in prison and changed their minds eventually because they too wanted access to the beds. It wasn’t his choice. That’s what he told himself every time he looked in the mirror. But it wasn’t feeling so true anymore.
At the end of his shift, he clocked out and made a promise to the computer screen glaring back at him: he’d find a way out. If he couldn’t track down what happened to his mother or do anything to help the beds, at least he could refuse to be a part of it. He had money in savings and there was his grandfather’s land that now belonged to him. At home, and again the next day as he went through his rounds, he made his plans for the future. His lease was up soon, anyway, and he had no real ties in town—he’d had trouble remaining friends with guys when he saw how much they enjoyed the new way, when he heard stories of their frequent and often raucous visits, when he passed them in the halls. Even Hector was just a convenience so he didn’t have to eat and drink alone.
Dom went through the motions in each room: checked the monitors, changed the gowns and sheets, switched out IV bags, and updated the meds in the book. He was like a machine, rhythmic. The list began to form in his head in a similar pattern, step one, step two, step three. First up, put in his notice at the hospital—thirty days was enough to get out clean. Second, get the deed and all the other important family items from the safety deposit box at the bank.
It was at step three, inform his landlord of his intent to move, that he didn’t notice he’d skipped a bed. He wrote the meds update in the book because he thought he’d pushed the new batch. The IV bag was full when he looked over so he assumed it was complete; he’d never made an error before. And there were protocols in place to catch these sorts of slips—people who came behind, monitors set to beep. Cracks had never split open in the seven years he’d been managing the floor. So no one thought any different when the medic on the next shift called in late, and no one saw the low power light on the monitor or heard the faint buzz as it went into backup mode. And no one was in the room hours later, on the quiet floor, when the woman in the bed blinked.
Emma Burcart lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches English and searches for the state’s best milkshake. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and was a fiction contributor at the 2017 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has been published in The Chattahoochee Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Catapult Magazine.