Changes

            Odie visited once during my pregnancy. She attempted to play a game of dominoes with me, but often became distracted in telling me tales of her imagined life. Every time I tried to broach a real world subject, like Kylie or anything about her short-lived relationship with Dedrick, she simply dodged around it.

            In a probable attempt to upset his twin, Francis slept beside me for a night. This confused my elderly husband.

            Kyle spent part of the night outside. I found him frozen solid on the grass early the next morning.

            “Come now Dear, you cannot die on me yet,” I muttered while using a hairdryer on his purple body. “You are not allowed to leave me with an infant.”

            My backaches were increasingly frequent and painful from the pregnancy. I decided to visit the spa, where I spent most of the rest of that day, leaving Kyle behind with the children. He called and told me about how they pestered him for hours about where I had gone.

            He failed to warn me that Milton and Lois aged. I returned from the spa and nearly asked who they were. They looked different as teenagers. Both had longer hair and fuller lips. It appeared as though they had both inherited my chin.

            “Those other ones better not grow up to be any uglier!”

I chastised Mother, of course. Although, it did make me wonder how vastly my younger twins would differ with age.

            The next morning I was woken early with pains of labor. While Kyle and I were at the hospital, my teenagers helped to reorganize Infant Central for its current needs.

            I gave birth to yet another set of twins: Aubrey and Gloria. They plucked at my maternal strings, although I did still worry about future bedroom arrangements.

            Kyle volunteered to take first watch of the newest twins, so that I could shower and rest a few hours.

            His passing on was not part of the arrangement.

            The iconic sound of Grimm coming for a soul shook me from my nap. I ran faster than I ever had to get to Infant Central, ignoring the fact that it was not necessary, as it was only a few yards from my bed. And I knew that Grimm did not often reconsider his decisions.

            The children were at school, allowing me to sob alone, save for the infants.

            When Grimm was gone, I was left with a bare rectangular urn on the rug. That was all that was left of my husband, a man who had helped me into my dream career and raised four of my children.

            The witch politely expressed condolences, but Mother never made an attempt to get inside my head that day. I told myself that was perfectly fine. A tiny seed of vulnerability wished to reach out and be coddled by her though.

            Thinking of Mother and the career she held, I set Kyle’s urn out on the shelf, hoping I might see his ghost one day. I chose to disregard Mother’s past talk of how ghosts were nothing of the people they had once been, simply floating projections that needed to be sucked into a Banshee Banisher.

Note: With Twallan's mod, I have risky woohoo in my game. I have it set at a 5% chance of pregnancy. Kyle and Aspen both wished for some lovin' and so I decided to take a risk and let them try risky one last time. I really didn't want any more babies in this generation, haha! And she had twins, again!!