Outlander (Borealis) by Ellie Bay Page A

suggestive.
    “The planet I come from…” He tensed behind me and I almost
lost my nerve.
    Without a word, he took a deep breath.
    There were so many questions swimming in my head, I had to
risk angering him. “Our bodies, they have…functions.”
    A breast cupped in each hand, he pressed himself harder
against me. “Our bodies have functions in Borealis too.”
    “Yes,” I said, almost breathlessly, “but I’m talking about
functions besides sex.”
    Marcus perched me onto his lap so he could see my face.
“Like what?”
    “Our Gods do not create men and women that look like you or
me.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “When a man comes—we also say ‘ejaculates’—into a woman’s
vagina, it is not only a release of pleasure.”
    He scrunched his nose as if he’d bitten into a lemon.
“Vagina?”
    I rolled my eyes. “Pussy, Marcus. When a man comes into a woman’s pussy , he releases a fluid that contains sperm.”
    Marcus was confused. I had to explain several terms and the
details of conception to him before we could proceed.
    After answering a barrage of questions, he hung on my every
word, engrossed with the creation of life on Earth. “A person grows inside
another person? Like animals?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s disgusting,” he said, appalled.
    I chuckled at the thought of him watching an actual birth.
    I placed his hands on my belly. “The real pain happens when
the baby is born, about nine months after conception.” I corrected myself when
it dawned on me that time was not measured in weeks, months or years in
Borealis. After a quick calculation in my head, I said, “That is equivalent to
270 days. Anyway, after that time, the baby comes out of the woman’s body
through her vagina.”
    The idea shocked him. He held me at arm’s length as if he
was trying to jar me back to sanity. “That would be excruciating.”
    “Yes, childbirth is very painful.”
    “How big is a baby anyway?”
    “Sizes can vary, but about this big.” I used my arms to
cradle an imaginary baby.
    Grimacing, he mulled that over. “Why would your God birth
people like animals? It seems cruel. Is it a form of worship?”
    His interesting take on childbirth made me smile. “I suppose
in a way it is. And men do not have babies, only women do.”
    “I should hope not,” he snorted. Like a child listening to a
bedtime story, he looked at me expectantly. “What happens next?”
    “Babies come into the world helpless, unable to speak, walk,
bathe or feed themselves. Parents must do everything for them. The mother feeds
the baby through her breast. Milk comes out of a little hole at the end of a
woman’s nipple.”
    I twitched when he pinched my right nipple and stared at its
tip. “You don’t have a little hole.”
    “No.” It was another puzzling reality of the changes my body
had undergone in Borealis, along with so many others, like the fact that I
could be nourished by one small meal a day—breakfast, and that there was no
need to urinate, defecate or menstruate.
    With awe he listened to me explain how babies grow into
children and eventually into adults. Marcus was especially spellbound with
parenthood itself. “That is unbelievable.”
    “How a baby turns into an adult?”
    “Yes, that too, but I mean all the work the,” he searched
for the term, “ Parents put into it. So much teaching and leading for
such a long time. It must be exhausting.”
    I nodded. “Yes, it is considered the most difficult thing
humans do and also the most rewarding.” For a bittersweet moment I thought how
nice it would be to have Marcus’s baby. But as long as we remained in Borealis,
that was impossible.
    For a while he was silent, his face masked with troubled
thoughts.  
    I raked my fingers through his hair. “What is it, Marcus?”
    A grim expression twisted his features. “You know too much
about this world for it to not exist.”
     
    He believes me!
    Tears crowded my eyes as I was flooded with