Goodnight My Love

By Brother Reid, Reid Faylor and The Story Must Be Told

Guy and Mandeela have dinner with a work friend, his wife, and their parasitic alien baby. The tender evening convinces the couple. On the other side of four abdominal eruptions, they too will have a family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Story Must Be Told
• Release date: Nov 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798868931765

Book preview

GNML-cover-epub.jpg

The Story Must Be Told

presents

Goodnight

My Love

by Brother Reid

Artwork and book design by Reid Faylor

The Story Must Be Told

Post Everything Productions

Copyright 2023

For my family and my biological family

Table of Contents

Invocation1

Implantation19

Eruption41

Isolation63

Indoctrination83

Revelation103

Afterword129

Goodnight

My Love

Invocation

Guy was washing dishes, listening to a podcast about fly fishing, when Mandeela asked him to pause it.

Ok.

He kept washing dishes. She asked him to stop that, too. That’s when he knew it was serious. She braced herself on the faux marble counter and took a deep breath.

What do you think of PIPS?

Guy didn’t mean to laugh. 

Pips? You mean, like, Gladys Knight & The ___? He made vaguely Motown woo woos at her. She frowned. 

PIPS. Plasmanellid Implantation Pregnancy Sequence.

For the next twenty minutes, Guy absorbed a long talk full of words he didn’t understand—multi-host xeno-anaesthesiated eruption, proboscis cell sampling, psycho-morphological osmosis. PIPS, as best he could gather, was invasive. PIPS would debilitate not just Mandeela, but Guy as well. But PIPS—and this was where it got tricky—meant they could have a baby. 

A baby? Guy repeated. It was a word they hadn’t spoken lately.

I have a coworker—he and his wife just went through it. They said we could come by, see what it’s like.

Guy still did not know what PIPS was, but seeing the cautious hope on Mandeela’s face, he didn’t need to. 

Of course. Haha, of course! They embraced. Do you want a lime seltzer?

When Mandeela went to bed, Guy stayed up on his phone and searched for PIPS. The first result was a picture of Gladys Knight. Searching PIPS pregnancy did better. He watched an animation posted on Facebook by St. Mary’s Fertility. A friendly asteroid hurtled through the atmosphere. It splashed in the ocean, cracked open like an egg. A cascade of pink cartoon hearts flowed forth and then: a tiny black tadpole. The rest was a soft-focus collage of grinning families and shiny, cone-headed babies. Guy was more confused than before.

He resorted to YouTube. Normally, he’d watch clips of ornery goats headbutting sedans, cats missing their jumps. This time, he found surgery footage. Guy couldn’t cover his eyes fast enough. Holes swiss-cheesed through lungs, leaking stomachs, a yellow flicking tongue, and black ink. The descriptions didn’t call it PIPS. They called it a parasite invasion.

The video’s narrator screamed, THIS is what happens when you take God out of the uterus! 

The rideshare car dropped Guy and Mandeela off at 344 McGuinness. By the third step up the stairs, Guy’s armpits were soaked. He clenched his jaw as they paced closer to the door of 3R. 

You alright? Mandeela asked. You look sick.

Guy nodded, but the pallor of his face did not ease Mandeela’s worry. He knocked. 

The man who answered was not what Guy expected. He looked like Guy—thinning, non-confrontational haircut, glasses, a pair of gray slacks from GapAdults. 

Mandeela! Long time no see, he laughed, ah, and this must be the Guy I’ve heard all about. He extended a hand. Crandon. Let’s toss your coats in the bedroom.

The couple followed Crandon to a modest bedroom. A white bassinet was pulled up to the side of the queen mattress. Guy lingered behind and looked inside. Black ink stains smeared the white fabric like it had incubated a restless squid.

He left the bedroom to see a woman hugging his wife. Black stains walked a trail up her sweatshirt, rimming her collar like she tried to drink tar and took too big a gulp.

It’s so nice having visitors. So much easier when people come to us!

She released Mandeela and Guy held out his hand to the woman. She was under five feet tall, but stocky enough she could pin him in a wrestling match. 

So this is the Guy I’ve heard so much about! She hugged him. I’m Trishy—and yes, we hug here!

A motley of Ikea rugs covered the desecrated, ancient wooden floor. Three bookshelves stood sentry on the walls—books in two, DVDs on another with records and tapes on the bottom. Guy felt at ease—he could be in his own home—until he saw the stains of black ink. Dots on record sleeves, trails like sneaker scuffs over the hardwood. Every glass frame was speckled.

As I was saying: they’re napping right now, but they sleep so soundly, so don’t worry about volume!

They? Guy asked.

"Acorn—the baby. We figure they is better than it."

Guy said nothing. It—so it really wasn’t human. 

How about drinks? Crandon asked.

After a couple glasses of wine, they ate dinner in the living room. They didn’t talk about the baby, doing standard get-to-know-you questions instead. Crandon was a big goof, and Trishy reminded Guy of his Aunt Pauline, the way she told stories with her whole body, adding sound effects like a kid reenacting a movie. With the warm confidence of his buzz, Guy was distracted into having a good time.

Then it started crying. 

Eeeuuuuugggghhhhhh!

The sound was not like a baby. It was airy, like a dying balloon trying to reclaim what it lost—eee heughh ee ee hueghh. 

Sounds like somebody’s hungry, Trishy laughed, and followed the sound.

Guy’s heart pounded as she left the room. Crandon asked Mandeela something, and they laughed together, but Guy heard none of it. He would see a parasite, a leech, the family invader. 

Who do you want, Mommy or Daddy? he heard Trishy say as she approached.

Guy would not turn to face it. He could not. Cold sweat dappled his forehead.

Next to him, Trishy’s chair creaked.

Ohh, are you ready for dinner? Mandeela said, voice delicate and sweet. He could not help but look up.

The child was the shape and size of an infant, but not near so solid. It was dressed in a powder blue-trimmed onesie with a sailor’s kerchief. Wherever it met skin, it smudged black with the child’s mystery drippings. Fresh from the source, the greasy substance it was thicker than Guy imagined, like running clay. It reeked of fennel. 

The child bubbled and sucked airily, then coughed. A fine spray of inky particles misted forth—but from where? Guy stopped breathing. He could find no face on the glossy, black turnip-shaped head, until something quivered at the narrow peak of the skull. The mouth was on top of the head! It was an aperture at the end of a thin stem—no wonder it whistled like a balloon. 

Guy dropped his gaze to his piled high plate of spaghetti. Mandeela asked polite questions, but he heard none of them. Images from surgical videos flashed in his mind—the blood, the ink, the eyes barred for anonymity. 

Well, I thought they wanted Mommy, but I think they want Daddy.

C’mere, tadpole, Crandon laughed.

He received his child and cradled it in his arms. Then he lifted his shirt.

At first, all Guy could see was the scar. A giant wine-red blot below his kidney the diameter of a fist. Then he saw another scar, smaller, like a purple asterisk to the main attraction. Guy took a hasty sip of wine. He could sense Crandon watching him, waiting for him to take it all in. Guy could not look yet, just listen. The tiny mouth did not chug or suck but popped and clicked at Crandon’s chest. Slowly, Guy’s focus shifted upwards.

Below Crandon’s solar plexus, a two-inch tube snaked from the father’s chest into Acorn’s puckered mouth. Through the cloudy plastic, Guy could see a yellow proboscis flitting in and out, turning red.

See? Crandon said. Everyone gets a lil dinner.’

Whatever Guy’s discomfort, Mandeela did not share in it. As the pounding in his ears faded, he could hear one of her questions.

Do you get a lot of stares being a breastfeeding dad?

Well, it’s not— 

I mean, not breastfeeding, but you know—

No, haha, it’s fine! It was very new to me, too, but you’d be amazed how quickly this felt natural.

Guy studied Crandon’s face. The father had the look of the Virgin Mary, an image of grace and half-lidded calm Guy had absorbed from parochial school. 

People will think whatever they want, Crandon continued. For us, I think it’s actually one of the bigger appeals.

Crandon was afraid of turning into his dad, Trishy explained.

Pretty much, he said. He wasn’t a part of my life. Tried to get to know me before he died, but too little too late, you know? I swore I would never be a father, but the more we learned about PIPS, and saw how, you know, I would be a part of the process, I stopped worrying. I think we’d have a lot more present fathers if traditional reproduction was like this.

Who took the first eruption?

Trishy raised a hand, then placed it over her side as she recalled.

But Guy did his part—eventually.

I was nervous, he laughed, but once they’re inside you, it’s…it’s—

Crandon began to cry, and Trishy laughed at him. 

"There he