THE BABY MILL [[{SHINee}]]

THE BABY MILL [[13]] CONDOM

JongHyun wasn’t quite sure why they were moving him. He’d been sleeping peacefully when the worker’s barge in to give him his wake-up call. His sleepy head hadn’t even inched off the pillow before he started trying to figure out what was happening. He realized that they must be here to collect his sperm once again, but it couldn’t be that since they’d been here a little before he’d fallen sleep; it was way too soon. But then again, you never really knew what went on in the doctor’s mind… So he couldn’t be sure…

            “Get up!” they’d shouted while kicking the foot of his bed. The brute movement had jostled his head enough to pull him out of his slumber.

           “Get up, I said!” The first worker yanked him out of bed by the collar of his thin shirt and set him on his feet. The slab of stone JongHyun saw to be the worker’s face gave away no indication of the situation or where he may possibly be going. Until he said, “You’re being transferred.”

            Transferred?

            He was tempted to ask why and where, but that would be going back on the promise he’d long ago made to himself.

            Barely covered in the bits of his stretching clothes, the two allowed him time to find his footing before guiding him into the hallway where they further escorted him around a few corners. Blank walls blinked at him with every new step he took, whispering words of encouragement to him that did nothing more than put him into a great unease.

            You can do it, they whispered. You can march strongly to your next torture chamber. The Jews did it so you can, too.

            Exhaustion tried to counteract the words of the walls by inviting him into a room full of plush pillows and padded floors. Every nook and cranny of the room it was formulating behind his fogging vision was jam packed with delicacies of his wildest imagination that he’d never be able to enjoy in the waking world and there was music so soft that it couldn’t have been real because he could barely hear it… It was being absorbed by the cushioned walls and floors… Which his toes just wanted to dig into as they pranced about in circles to find a comfortable spot to lie in.

            Come back, the walls pleaded, fighting to compete with the sleep beckoning to him. We can protect you from the torture; bathe you in our security.

            It was hard to figure out which side was telling the truth (and at this point, which side was talking).

            A gut clenching scream helped him figure it out quick, though. A single scream would have sufficed but it kept coming one after the other, a momentum being created that didn’t seem like it was going to be broken any time soon. The high pitch to it suggested that it may have been a girl but the more JongHyun listen to it the more he could hear the ringing baritone under the strain of the pained whines. At this point, he couldn’t even decipher whether the screams he was hearing were actually that. The more he listened the more it started to sound like the shrieks of banshees after luring in their victims. They were tearing at his eardrums with dagger sharp, manicured nails that could have gutted an elephant with one swipe.

            The pain…

            Where was it coming from?

            How was it able to make his whole body break out into debilitating shivers…?

            Delivery.

            JongHyun’s eyes brought him to the sign that held that word. It sparked under the glow of the lights, burning his pupils with its lying radiance. The metal plaque itself wasn’t what affected him so, however. It was the thought that men were… Were… Beyond that sign… Everything happening in that hallway unnerved him to the fullest.

            Delivery.

            There was a carrier somewhere down there. Behind a closed door a poor boy cried out for mercy while a demon child tried to force its way out of its unnatural habitat. It was ripping apart his body, clawing desperately with its itty bitty fingers trying to find a way out so it could breathe in the oxygen it’d been denied for months – maybe weeks. JongHyun could only imagine…

            And the first face the thing would see wouldn’t even be that of its parents. Did it even get to feel the warmth radiating off the body of his carrier? Could he feel the heart beat of the one that had sustained its own tiny little, thump-thump, thump-thump? Or was the introductory meeting between the new life and life giver as worthless as the donor who’s DNA made up a third of its body…?

            “Get a move on, boy!” a worker ushered, not liking that their pace had noticeably slowed.

            JongHyun didn’t want to risk a jab at his sensitive back and so he forced one foot to step in front of the other even faster than he would usually be capable of usually. He tried to tell himself that it was the punishment for disobedience that was spooking him, but he knew deep down that he wasn’t running away from the violence.

            No… It ran much deeper than that…

            As much as he was anxious to figure out where he was being transferred, too, he couldn’t get that scream out of his head. The first one that had rang out for so long in one tremulous note. His carrier had already delivered one child. He might have even had had more that he wasn’t aware of. To imagine him in the position that he’d imagined the other carrier. To picture him going through the agony of birth… With his scream intermingling with the shouts around him.

            “Here.”

            A door opened and revealed the interior of the room he’d been transferred to. It wasn’t much, hosting the same white paint and walls barren of any form of decoration save maybe a grease spot in the upper right corner, and a cement floor. The only difference separating this room from the previous one was the size and the bed that looked like it could hold two people rather than one. JongHyun would have traded that big bed for a window. Or even a plant. A glimpse of the outdoors while being chained to a wall to assure that he wouldn’t try to bolt through the glass. But that bed did look extremely comfortable… Too bad it was adjacent to the toilet.

            “Feel lucky; you made the tops list,” the worker who’d opened the door announced. He made sure that JongHyun was able to climb into his bed and relatively settled in before making his leave along with his partner.

            Alone.

            He was utterly alone again in this big, little world. In a big, little room with a big, little bed, in the same big, little place.

            Top list? Why? Because his carrier had successfully conceived a child and carried it full term? Was that a cause to be celebrated? Why was he being rewarded for causing such a monstrosity?

            A monstrosity that was already tugging at his heartstrings.

            If anything, it should have been his carrier who was rewarded with all these “gifts”.

            Because he’s also tugging on your heartstrings.

            Maybe he did have that, though.

            Maybe he was tugging at his heartstrings, too.

            How would JongHyun know if he didn’t? Maybe he had a nice big room eating him up and making him feel like he was nothing but another speck of dust floating in the polluted air of the institution.

            Or maybe he was wailing pitifully like the boy beyond the metal plaque and trying to find a grip on the handles that protruded from the box holding on to his final gasps of recycled oxygen…