Chainsaw

 The storm outside was not merely rain; it was a rhythmic assault, lashing the crumbling stone of the manor as if nature itself were trying to break in. Inside, the air tasted of copper and wet earth. My wife, Elara, lay upon the master bed, her face a translucent mask of agony, her screams swallowed by the velvet curtains that draped the room like shrouds.

When the midwife, Mother Hecate, arrived, she did not knock. She simply materialized from the shadows of the hallway, her cloak smelling of stagnant pond water and ancient decay. She was a mountain of a woman, her features obscured by the deep hood, save for a mouth that hung in a permanent, mirthless sneer.

I stood by the threshold, trembling, desperate for the familiar tropes of comfort. "Hot water," I croaked, my throat raw. "Towels. Please—she is suffering."

Hecate did not move to the basin. Instead, she reached into the oversized, stained satchel at her hip. With a wet, metallic *shink*, she withdrew a device that defied the laws of medicine—and sanity. It was a chainsaw, forged from blackened iron and etched with weeping, sightless faces. The chain links were not steel, but serrated, obsidian teeth.

"Towels are for the living," Hecate rumbled, her voice the sound of gravel grinding in a grave. She pulled the starter cord. The engine did not roar; it shrieked—a high, discordant keening that sounded like a thousand trapped souls being flayed at once. "This instrument was perfected in the Deep Ages, designed to navigate the complexities of flesh that refuses to yield."

She stepped toward the bed. The vibration of the saw made the floorboards weep dark, viscous fluid. I tried to move, to stop her, but my feet were rooted to the spot, my body paralyzed by a sudden, unnatural cold.

Elara’s screams cut off. Her eyes, wide and glassy, fixed on the ceiling as Hecate descended. There was no blood at first—only a mist of black, oily vapor that filled the room. The saw didn’t just cut; it erased. I watched, blinded by terror, as Hecate carved a perfect, geometric aperture into my wife’s abdomen, moving with the rhythmic precision of a clockmaker.

"The seed must be harvested," Hecate hissed.

She plunged her gloved, needle-fingered hands into the wound. She didn't pull out a child. She pulled out a mirror.

It was a jagged shard of obsidian, pulsating with a rhythmic, wet heartbeat. Hecate held it up to my face. I looked into the glass, expecting to see my own horror-stricken reflection.

Instead, I saw myself—or rather, the man I *thought* I was—rotting in a casket, buried beneath the very floorboards of this bedroom, decades ago. I saw the worms, the dry bones, and the hollowed-out skull.

I looked back at the bed. Elara was gone. In her place sat a desiccated, centuries-old corpse, her skeletal hand clutching the handle of the chainsaw.

Hecate turned to me, pulling back her hood. She had no face, only a mirror where her features should have been.

"The child is born, Father," the entity whispered, its voice emanating from my own throat. "And you have finally returned to the womb."

The floorboards beneath me dissolved into a hungry, yawning abyss, and as I fell into the darkness, I realized with a final, sickening clarity: I was never the husband. I was the afterbirth, the memory of a man who died waiting for a midwife who had been waiting for me for three hundred years.