Jaime Gill
The Hate Baby
First Trimester
“Kate, please stay calm,” Dr. Keenan says, with kind eyes but no smile. Have those words ever calmed anyone? “I have difficult news.” The air in the room thins. My hand moves to my stomach—involuntary, but the gesture feels stagy, like I’m in a bad movie. “I’m sorry, but we can’t terminate.”
“No,” I say, trying to sound assertive, not desperate. I try to remember the speech my sister wanted me to memorize but I was sure I wouldn’t need. “You can’t refuse me. I called and registered in advance. I travelled here specifically because the law—”
“It’s not that,” Dr. Keenan interrupts, hand raised. “You’re experiencing toxin-triggered parthenogenesis. You probably know it as TTP.”
I stare. This happens to other people. It can’t be happening to me.
“I’m having a hate baby?”
“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Keenan says.
Her arm twitches, as though she were about to reach for me but decided against it.
I drink three gin and tonics on the flight home. The attendant grimaces when I ask for the third, and I briefly think it’s because he’s seen I’m pregnant. I almost tell him to stop judging me, it’s a hate pregnancy, but calm myself. There’s no baby bump, not yet. He just thinks I’m a garden variety alcoholic. My resentment still froths at that assumption until I remember resentment is one of the toxic emotions Dr. Keenan warned me against.
I still have a bunch of leaflets Dr. Keenan must have given me, though I was so dazed I don’t recall her actually handing them over. I take one from my bag now and slide it inside the meal menu, so the old man in the aisle can’t see. I read about parthenogenesis, a word I doubt I’ll ever be able to say even if it is the word that fucks my life up. Parthenogenesis is a non-sexual form of reproduction often seen in reptiles. Great, I’m a pregnant fucking lizard. TTP is impervious to all known contraceptives and is triggered when the host (a better word than mother, I agree) is exposed for prolonged periods to external stimulation fostering extreme negative emotions.
“In a way,”—Dr. Keenan had said, sounding not-very-scientific—“TTP can be seen as a positive bodily function. It expels toxins.”
“Like throwing up?” I said.
“Less pleasant than that.”
So now, of course, I’m trying not to think about anything I hate. No more wondering who is worse, the spineless politicians or the duped dopes voting for them. No more fantasies of sociopathic billionaires locked up. But it’s like that game where someone asks you not to think of an elephant, and there it is in your brain—the elephant. There they are—everyone I hate.
I feel a tiny movement inside. I think I just fed the hate baby.
I try soothing myself by listening to Joni Mitchell on my headphones. I look out of the window, at the pretty cornfields laid below like a patchwork quilt. I even try breathing exercises, like in that meditation class I attended twice before I decided I didn’t have this “center” the instructor babbled about. But I can’t stop my mind from moving towards the discomfort in my belly. I’m so aware of it now, that little ball of poisonous tissue.
This is Tony’s fault, even if it wasn’t his sperm that did the impregnating. I knew we shouldn’t watch the news so much. I told him we should cut down on social media, I said we should delete Twitter, when it was still called that. But Tony spouted bullshit about good citizens being aware citizens. Well, great, Tony. You’re informed and I’m having a hate baby. Round of fucking applause.
God, I have to stop thinking like this. It's the only way. Dr. Keenan said doctors are still working on TTP solutions—in those countries where they’re allowed to, anyway—but no safe abortion method has been found yet. Terminations are always deadly to the mother. The moment a hate fetus dies, it dissolves into its constituent toxins and poisons its host, instantly and fatally.
There are two slightly-less-appalling options. Trying to block out all the ugly noise of the world—all the injustices, idiocies and cruelties that feed negative emotions—can starve the hate fetus of enough material for growth, precipitating a safe miscarriage. Or—if toxic emotions can’t be eliminated from the host’s experience—the fetus will grow until it is large and solid enough and can be delivered relatively safely.
I have to learn not to hate. I am not giving birth to this fucking thing.
Why can’t Tony be the one having a hate baby?
No, I’ve got to be kinder. Hate gets inside men too. In their cases, it metastasizes into cancer. For the first time since Adam and Eve, men might have actually drawn the biological short straw. The spleen, the stomach, the bile duct, the prostate—hate latches onto those. Tony needs a check-up.
Second Trimester
I’m at the TTP Support Group, one of a dozen women in a circle. Kumbay-fucking-ya. One red-headed woman’s stomach is so swollen I can’t look at it, can’t bear to imagine the tangled toxic mass lodged beneath her stretched skin. My brain flashes on a memory from that documentary we saw: a newborn hate baby howling at the camera, skin a sickly mottled green, mouth already full of jagged teeth.
“Let’s begin,” Clarissa, our group guide, says. “Speak your truth but speak it kindly. Especially to yourself.” Once I’d have texted Tony or my sister a vomiting emoji, but I don’t have a smartphone now and mocking is a form of hate, too. I force myself to smile. Fake it ‘til you make it, Tony says, though I’m not sure that works when the it is inside you.
There is a brief silence, which I push my way into. I’ve spent weeks sealed up at home with no Internet, just a brain-sucking succession of cozy documentaries, subtitled Korean soap operas, and Disney movies. My musical diet is also curated, endless Mamas and Papas, Sigur Ros, and The Beatles before they went weird and got into politics. Peace and quiet, that’s what my mother would have called it, though it feels stifled and sterile to me. Tony’s so terrified of triggering hateful responses that he barely talks to me now. Which would make me hate him, if I wasn’t afraid to. So, yeah, I need to talk.
“I’m frightened,” I say. Clarissa cocks her head, which isn’t infuriating, no it isn’t. “I try to avoid toxic emotions. I practice the TTP Kindness Principles. I never expose myself to politics or the news but the… it’s still growing.”
Sympathetic murmurs in surround sound.
The TTP Support Groups are new. The burgeoning industry of TTP theorists argue that hate pregnancies have probably occurred throughout human history, but been freakishly rare, with most blamed on curses or other local superstitions. The numbers began climbing in the late 20th century, then started to rise exponentially after 2010. Most experts argue that acceleration is due to the cumulative impact of smartphones, social media, political polarization, economic stagnation, climate terror, etc. etc. etc. etc. Except for the vaccine conspiracy theorists, but I mustn’t think about those pieces of shit, or the TTP baby rights groups, and definitely not those freaky religious sects waving their “Jesus Was A Hate Baby Too” placards.
There’s probably something ironic about the fact that I’m a trained researcher but I can’t even read up on my own condition. Just reading about TTP risk factors triggers enough rage in me to swell the fetus. Tony did tell me— carefully—that the current rates are about 1 in 5,000 pregnancies, though it varies country to country. I try not to think “why me”, because that’s another bus ride to Hate Town. There are certainly enough TTPs now to make support groups like this viable even in a small city like ours.
“Fear is an understandable but complex emotion,” Clarissa says. I tell myself she doesn’t mean to sound condescending, she’s just trying to calm me. “We must accept its existence, allow it space, but not be ruled by it.” She smiles, benevolently. “Fear is a doorway to hate.”
Does Clarissa know she sounds like fucking Yoda?
Third trimester
Tony and I walk towards the forbidding, dark brick building of the TTP Residential Facility. Most people call it the Hate Orphanage. It’s in a mental institution that was closed down thirty years ago, and doesn’t look like it’s been refurbished since.
On the two-hour drive here, we listened to talk radio. One rabble-rousing host made a joke about how TTP women are angry feminists and their children were always going to be little monsters, it’s just you can see it now. When he changed the subject to some immigrant outrage, we found another station and a call-in where people raged about respectful TTP terminology, as if fixing the English language just so would also fix the world. I loathed them all. Pure, glorious hate.
I wallow in toxic emotions lately, a hippo in mud. Since I accepted it isn’t possible to live in this world without hating it—not for me, anyway— I’ve surrendered. If I’m going to get this thing out of me, I want to do it fast, so I’m on an all-hate, all-rage diet to make the fetus grow.
Every day I descend to our basement to listen for hours to Nine Inch Nails or Curve at full volume. Smashing Pumpkins, too, but skipping right past the hippie ballads. I scream along to every word, matching their fury and bile. No. Exceeding it. Tony hides upstairs with his headphones on, since we’re trying to reduce his hate intake. No signs of cancer yet, but he’s in a high-risk group, his doctor said. Living with a TTP woman is in itself a risk factor. Well, fuck you too, Mr. Doctor.
I spend three hours on my restored Twitter account every day and can actually feel my stomach getting harder and bigger. Sometimes I feel proud of myself for making the fetus grow so fast, then I hate myself for feeling any pride towards this thing, and—of course—that works too.
As we walk towards the orphanage, we hear the screams and snarls of the hate babies, even over the tall, glum walls with their barbed wire crowns. There must be some kind of playground on the other side.
Tony looks pale, but it was his idea to come. He said it was the only responsible thing to do. If nothing else, the creature will be sentient when it’s born and if we’re sending it away we should know where it’s going. I didn’t argue—it seemed like a perfect opportunity for a hate feast.
We step inside a reception or lobby with high ceilings, though it’s impossibly gloomy and we can’t see any staff. There’s a thump thump thump on the floors above and a strange strangled cry that’s almost a word. One of the older hate babies, presumably. A hate teen, maybe.
Tony takes my arm, turning his stupid big brown eyes on me. “Can we do this? Just give it away and leave it to”—he gestures at the cavernous gloom—“whatever life it will have here?”
Oh, that’s good, Tony. That’s really making me hate you. Good baby food.
“If you want to raise this thing, you’ll be doing it without me,” I say.
A door opens and a staff member hurries towards us, mumbling apologies. Behind him, we can hear the disgusting sounds from the playground. By the vivid red scratch on the man’s neck, I presume he was playing with them. Gross. I listen to their bestial sounds and I hate them and I revel in it.
The monster squirms inside me. Do you hate them, too? I wonder, then thrust the thought away. That’s a recent development. Brief flashes of connection, notions that maybe me and the thing inside me aren't so different. The most hateful thoughts of all.
I wince from a blunt pain in my stomach. My baby can really kick.
Jaime Gill is a queer, British-born writer happily exiled in Cambodia, where he works and volunteers for nonprofits. He reads, runs, boxes, travels, writes, occasionally socialises. His stories have appeared in Blue Earth Review, Trampset, f(r)iction, NFFR, Phoebe, Litro, and more, with stories due to appear in The Forge and Fractured. He has won multiple awards including a 2024 Bridport Prize and the 2025 Luminaire Prose Award. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions, he’s currently writing a novel, a script, and far too many short stories. More at www.jaimegill.com, www.x.com/jaimegill, www.instagram.com/mrjaimegill or https://bsky.app/profile/jaimegill.bsky.social.
