The nameless protagonists of Catherine Zeidler's "Pregnant" meet beneath a burned out streetlight on the Brooklyn Bridge, an ominous beginning to a relationship that's eventually characterized by drunken delusions and hallucinatory co-dependence.  Zeidler's language is full of strong imagery that evokes a nervous paranoia in the reader, her sentences building dread a word at a time, full of misunderstanding and hurt.  The narrator describes her lover as he "laughs like a ship burning" and how during sex he "huddles his head between my legs and kisses me as if I could kiss back down there," making him more beautiful even as he becomes more and more brutally loving.  Her life is quickly consumed by this man she's brought home, both figuratively and literally, as their sex leads to almost animalistic violence:

He has bitten my fingers down so much that they are all blood and holes.  He has peeled my nails mostly off with his teeth.  I can't touch anything without it digging into raw flesh.  When they grow back they will be rough and strained and then I don't know who I'll be.

Eventually, the man becomes convinced he's pregnant, feeding the baby in his belly the narrator's hair and skin, trading her life for his imagined baby's.  As his foraging for fetal nourishment ravages her body, the narrator swings further into his power, leading finally to a powerful ending that both confirms and denies the worst of what's come before.  "Pregnant" is, without question, a severely bleak story, but it's also a beautiful one.  Whatever the quality of the love between the characters, there's no doubt in my mind that it is in fact love, something the narrator celebrates even as it threatens to destroy her.

"Pregnant" is Catherine Zeidler's first published story, and it's easily one of the strongest short stories I've read lately.   I'll be looking forward to reading more of her work in the future

Read Catherine Zeidler's "Pregnant" in Hobart #6.

Bonus materials at the Hobart Website: "Sketches"