![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aldersprigFor kc_obrien's prompt.
These are excerpts from an unwritten novel, “A Star Rises in the East;” in this novel, Jesus Christ was not born in ~0 BCE but in 2012. Christianity never came into being, other, smaller religions rising instead. A young woman named Jessica, engaged to be married but still a virgin, discovers she is pregnant; this story tells of her travails and travels with her fiancé Tyler as they seek to find a doctor who can explain this medical miracle.
Their travels take them to the outskirts of Chicago, where Jessica finds herself in labor, in mid-winter, on Superbowl Sunday.
Jessica had bypassed frightened and headed straight into a numb sort of terror. She clung tightly to Tyler’s hand, grateful for his presence while cringing as he yelled at the nurse. “What do you mean there’s no-one on duty?”
“It’s a federal holiday. There’s a skeleton staff, but there’s no-one in the OB-GYN department and we weren’t expecting you and your… young lady.”
“We’ve been emailing with Dr. Gannon for seven months now!” Tyler yelled. “He knew we were coming!”
“He certainly didn’t know you were coming on a holiday!” The nurse was getting angry right back now, but the contractions had begun to distract Jessica from the shouting.
“The baby is not listening to anyone’s timetable but his own, and possibly Jehovah’s!” He certainly hadn’t asked anyone but possibly Jehovah if he could be conceived.
“Well, then Jehovah will have to provide him a place to be born, because we certainly don’t have one!”
~
Baby Joshua was growing quickly, and Jessica couldn’t find it in her heart to begrudge him even the two a.m. feedings or the messy diapers. He was a beatific baby, but he was, divine conception or no, still a baby, with fusses and tantrums and the occasional spit-up all over a shirt she’d been unwise enough not to cover.
The experts that had been so unwilling to help earlier had begun climbing out of the woodwork since they got home. The cattle farmers who wanted to see if this was like the state farm two-headed calves, she didn’t mind all that much – in this day and age, they seemed to understand the nitty-gritty of babies better than anyone. The scientists wanting DNA samples bothered her, but the first one’s machine had declared Null Error File Not Found, and no-one else had been able to do better. Her own genetic pattern was perfectly normal and human; Joshua’s, on the other hand, was inscrutable. That suited her, too.
But the freaks that had been coming lately frightened her a bit. Religious guys, rabbis, priests, scholars, they were mostly okay. The science guys, they were a bit scarier. The ones that combined the two…
“Jess, we got another Science of the Faith guy at the front door. Do you want to let him in?”
“They only stalk if we don’t. Hold on, let me get decent.” She pulled a blanket over the two of them; she wasn’t going to interrupt Joshua’s feeding, not even for Jehovah himself. “Send him in.”
It wasn’t a him, in this case, but three of them, lab coats over-embroidered until they looked like some sort of vestment, the magnifying glasses purely decorative. “Hail the mother of the scientific anomaly,” they chanted. “Hail the child born of no father. Hail… and bring him death.”
Tyler had been getting quicker. He tackled the men to the ground before they even drew the weapons out of their coats.
kc_obrien's prompt.These are excerpts from an unwritten novel, “A Star Rises in the East;” in this novel, Jesus Christ was not born in ~0 BCE but in 2012. Christianity never came into being, other, smaller religions rising instead. A young woman named Jessica, engaged to be married but still a virgin, discovers she is pregnant; this story tells of her travails and travels with her fiancé Tyler as they seek to find a doctor who can explain this medical miracle.
Their travels take them to the outskirts of Chicago, where Jessica finds herself in labor, in mid-winter, on Superbowl Sunday.
Jessica had bypassed frightened and headed straight into a numb sort of terror. She clung tightly to Tyler’s hand, grateful for his presence while cringing as he yelled at the nurse. “What do you mean there’s no-one on duty?”
“It’s a federal holiday. There’s a skeleton staff, but there’s no-one in the OB-GYN department and we weren’t expecting you and your… young lady.”
“We’ve been emailing with Dr. Gannon for seven months now!” Tyler yelled. “He knew we were coming!”
“He certainly didn’t know you were coming on a holiday!” The nurse was getting angry right back now, but the contractions had begun to distract Jessica from the shouting.
“The baby is not listening to anyone’s timetable but his own, and possibly Jehovah’s!” He certainly hadn’t asked anyone but possibly Jehovah if he could be conceived.
“Well, then Jehovah will have to provide him a place to be born, because we certainly don’t have one!”
~
Baby Joshua was growing quickly, and Jessica couldn’t find it in her heart to begrudge him even the two a.m. feedings or the messy diapers. He was a beatific baby, but he was, divine conception or no, still a baby, with fusses and tantrums and the occasional spit-up all over a shirt she’d been unwise enough not to cover.
The experts that had been so unwilling to help earlier had begun climbing out of the woodwork since they got home. The cattle farmers who wanted to see if this was like the state farm two-headed calves, she didn’t mind all that much – in this day and age, they seemed to understand the nitty-gritty of babies better than anyone. The scientists wanting DNA samples bothered her, but the first one’s machine had declared Null Error File Not Found, and no-one else had been able to do better. Her own genetic pattern was perfectly normal and human; Joshua’s, on the other hand, was inscrutable. That suited her, too.
But the freaks that had been coming lately frightened her a bit. Religious guys, rabbis, priests, scholars, they were mostly okay. The science guys, they were a bit scarier. The ones that combined the two…
“Jess, we got another Science of the Faith guy at the front door. Do you want to let him in?”
“They only stalk if we don’t. Hold on, let me get decent.” She pulled a blanket over the two of them; she wasn’t going to interrupt Joshua’s feeding, not even for Jehovah himself. “Send him in.”
It wasn’t a him, in this case, but three of them, lab coats over-embroidered until they looked like some sort of vestment, the magnifying glasses purely decorative. “Hail the mother of the scientific anomaly,” they chanted. “Hail the child born of no father. Hail… and bring him death.”
Tyler had been getting quicker. He tackled the men to the ground before they even drew the weapons out of their coats.
