The first week of month seven, Greg's navel just surrendered and popped out like a little white flag, gave up the fort. Greg seemed like he was exploding with alarming speed. He was tired of simply swaying around the house with his heavy belly sticking out of my old sweatpants and t-shirts – he'd long since given up on his own – and I got him some proper maternity clothes.  They fit weird, but they fit better than what he had.

We had fun trying to disguise that huge belly and went out together a few times to get some other baby stuff. I don't know what people thought – he looked like a barrel on stilts and walked like he'd just learned how, even when he was hanging on to me for balance. Those expeditions were pretty short, though – we learned pretty quickly that he couldn't stay on his feet very long before he just wanted to lay down and sleep. After a couple of times of falling asleep so heavily in the car on the way home that I had to shake him awake, he gave up and told me that I should just handle stuff.

He stayed home, scratching and bursting out of his maternity clothes and stretching everything that hurt – which seemed, more and more, to be every muscle he had. He didn't really whine any more about his aches and pains, he complained with weary emphasis, held on to his shaking belly when our babies moved inside it, came to me for sympathy.

But by the end of that seventh month, Greg was Big, capital B intended, and he was Bitchy about it, capital B also intended.

"Okay," he said, sitting up against our headboard one evening. "Ready to be done now. Ready for babies to come out." He arched his back so he could get at the underside of his dense belly to scratch it.  It made him stick way out, nearly to his knees. He still had those teeny tiny boobs, and his legs had gotten a little more muscular to support his weight, but he was mostly still whippet-thin. Hell, he could even still get his old jeans on and zip them right up to around his skinny hips. But that belly, oh, man. It stuck out all around – front, top, bottom, sides, and it bulged out high and far, because there wasn't any room for it to get between those hips.

And it was so big that . . . well, I had to admit he looked like he was ready to be done. More than ready. He looked like those pictures in our pregnancy books that had captions like, "At this point, your doctor will have recommended inducing labor." Just over forty pounds, my little lover had somehow managed to pack onto himself when I wasn't looking, and he was almost all baby. His retarded waddle was a full-fledged sway, and he had to work hard to hold everything in place while he tried to keep it manageable – one of those skinny hands wrapped around the small of his back, the other trying, not very well, to support that ridiculously bulging weight in front of him.

But what I said in response was, "Gotta be almost done, sweetcheeks. Just a little more."

"God," he said. "I can't believe it." He shifted into a new position for the tenth time since he'd gotten in bed. "I feel like I've got nowhere else to grow."

"Well, it's supposed to slow down a lot after the second trimester. You'll probably just stay that way, mostly. Maybe a couple more pounds." I didn't mention that he should have already slowed down, a lot more than this. It seemed like it was bound to happen, anyway, so why bring it up?

"I'm all squeezed inside. Oh, damn, gotta pee." Greg started heaving his way up. He made it to the edge of the bed, leaning back on both hands, and started that slow wriggle he had to do to try to get that tiny pelvis centered under his big baby bulge. It was a three-step process now, mostly, for him to get up: balance that big belly in the middle of his skinny frame, lean it forwards very slowly so he didn't do a faceplant, and shove up hard as he could with legs and arms. He mostly made it. That night, he was sleepy, and I watched him try to work through the process three times. He lurched, he grunted, he wiggled, but gravity just kept him on the edge of the bed.

He turned to me, finally: "You gonna laugh at me all night, or you gonna give me a hand, here?"

He was right, it was kind of mean to grin at the problem. I decided I could do it without getting out of bed, myself, and I knelt behind him, got my hands under his armpits. "Oopsa-daisy," I said, and, with both of us hauling at him, he made it all the way up.

"Thanks, creep," he said, with dignity, and swayed his way off to the toilet with both hands hauling up under his belly to try to keep it off his bladder.

After that month, things got . . . out of control. Because Greg's belly didn't slow down. It sped up.

He stopped eating like a wolf, started picking at everything. Started eating less than I was. He was eating on the sofa now, mostly, because the kitchen chairs were too uncomfortable for him to manage. He was there most of the time, lying on his side, fingering gingerly at his too-big pregnancy. He slept more and more, and I thought all these changes must be a good sign. Labor must be approaching.

Two weeks in to that eighth month, I got home and he was just crying helplessly on the sofa. I knelt down in front of him, curled one hand around him to rub at his back. "Hey, honey," I said, "Bad day?"

He held on to me and howled for a little bit. "I'm starving," he said, finally, through his sobs. "I've been trying not to eat so I don't get any bigger. I'm so uncomfortable all the time, being this pregnant, and I'm sorry I ate so much before. So I was trying not to eat, but now I'm so tired I can't get up. And it's not working. I'm bigger. I measured."

"Oh, honey." I felt terrible now about all those times I had teased him, yelled at him, about stuffing his face. "Okay." I smoothed his hair back from his face. "You're so tired you're not thinking straight. I don't think it works that way.  You don't look like you're getting fat.  I think you needed so much food because the twins need it. I know you're unhappy, but you've got to eat, not just for the babies, but for yourself. You're going to hurt yourself."

I got him dinner, and more dinner, and breakfast. I made him lunches in the morning before I left. I aimed for low-calorie but filling, hoping that would help to balance things out. Eating enough to satisfy himself made Greg clutch nervously at that dense ball of flesh that looked like it was glued onto him, but at least he said he felt well enough that he wasn't exhausted 24/7.

And he was right to be nervous. By the end of the next week, the damages were obvious.

His back began to be pulled into such a bow that he couldn't straighten up any more. It looked like his belly was pushing so hard at his insides that it was actually shoving the front of his hips and the bottom of his ribcage apart from each other. He couldn't even try to lean forwards any more; he barely had any muscles left that he could convince to do anything in his torso. They were all flattened and stretched and just about torn to bits, and sometimes he'd just lie there and moan and hold on to that angry ache, it was hurting him so badly. I tried to help, but it was hard. Sometimes he could stand it if I tried to massage the pain away, and I'd rub gently at his bulge – it seemed hard under my hands, really hard – and at the other muscles that were all screaming at him, the ones in his back and in his thighs. We finaly started to rub lotion into him on a regular basis, because his skin was painfully itchy. But sometimes he couldn't stand to be touched or spoken to, and then I'd just hand him the Tylenol and turn out the lights and let him try to work it out himself.

The whole thing, more and more, stopped being about the babies that were coming, and started being about Greg's growing belly. It almost had to be; it was ruling everything about his life, and started to rule mine. The kids were still moving inside, sluggishly, as they began to cram him completely full, but it was hard to be excited about those movements when they were causing him such increasing distress, even pain. They'd start to move, and he'd just jerk his head back and whimper and try to hold on to his bursting belly. He even threw up right in the middle of it a couple of times, said he'd gotten such a jab in the stomach that he had to. It was another thing where all I could do was hold onto him if he wanted it – I could feel all that writhing inside easily now, but it felt like less of a promise of fatherhood and more of a threat of pain.

At the weigh-in at the end of that eighth month, I don't think he even cared any more what the numbers said, he was so miserable. I did. I cared a lot, because I was starting to panic, and the numbers weren't helping. Sixty pounds over that very first weigh-in. That was over twenty pounds he'd gained in the last month, and he'd only weighed a hundred and twenty, to start with. I stared at the scale.

"Can I go lie down now?" Greg asked, in his sad voice, and I knew he needed my help to get to bed, again. He couldn't really fit on the sofa any more.

"Yeah, of course," I said, and hopped up to help him. By now, both of us were trying to keep him centered almost everywhere he went, our arms wrapped around his middle and his back and each other. He'd exploded so quickly straight out the front over the last month that he could barely guide his trajectory when in motion. It didn't help that he was so tired all the time that his coordination was shot. He looked like a fertility experiment gone terribly wrong, and not just because of his gender. Those slim hips hadn't budged an inch outwards, and he said they were constantly grinding with pain when he was standing, sometimes even when he wasn't, because of the force against them. Perched on top of them was that sixty-pound belly the size of a beach ball, and then those barely-there tits, and then Greg's skinny arms and neck.

We had to be almost done now, we had to be. Any day now, those hips, the ones almost buried beneath the growth taking over his body, would spread, and things would be ready. Contractions would start. I was ready. I'd read the books.

But he kept growing into the ninth month, and growing so fast. His big belly was nearly totally rigid and nearly perfectly round; it was like it was expanding so quickly that it didn't have time to droop. We gave up on the bedroom; it was too hard for him to manage the awkward angle on the toilet in the master bath, and he didn't want to be held most of the time, now. He was hot and increasingly sensitive all over, and we had trouble getting the bedding to support him as much as he needed.

He moved into the recliner in the living room, instead, kept it permanently reclined, with a complicated arrangement of pillows that let him sleep, move, breathe. I rigged up some other furniture around it to effectively extend its surface area. It was a little harder to get in and out of than the bed, but I was helping him almost all the time with that, anyway. I started sleeping on the sofa, jerking at every moan he made, and he made a lot.

The first time I found him crawling down the hallway, his taut, hanging belly skimming the floor, I panicked all over again. "Did it start?" I yelled. "Greg, are you in labor?"

"No," he panted at me. "I have to pee." It got so that even when I helped him out of the chair to the bathroom and back, he preferred to crawl rather than have me try to keep him on his overburdened legs and the thin hips that hurt so badly he could hardly move them.

He wore only button-up shirts on top, always unbuttoned, claimed they were they only thing that fit and didn't chafe. All day, he'd just stay in that recliner, half sitting up and mostly on his side. He was nested in pillows, with a sloppy shirt and a pair of sweatpants tugged down around his hips, sometimes with a sheet over him. Growing.

I don't know how much he weighed by that point. And by that, I mean I don't know how much Greg's belly weighed, because I think there was almost as much belly as there was Greg. It weighed a lot, definitely, but it woul have been cruel to try to get him on the scale to find out just how much. But he almost stopped eating entirely again, would say he wasn't hungry when I kissed him goodbye in the morning or got home from work. I could hear his stomach complaining, and I'd get him to manage some soup or cereal or something, but it was like he filled up in about ten seconds. He got addicted to juice boxes, though, those little cardboard sugar bombs, and I bought a ton, kept some in the fridge, some by the recliner so he could suck them down whenever the urge took him. At least it was something.

He spent more and more time asleep, more time under the sheet, and when I came home one evening, he actually was so groggy I had trouble waking him up to see if he was okay. When I peeled down the sheet, I suddenly realized what had happened so gradually that I hadn't noticed properly: he was losing weight everywhere that wasn't his belly. That beast was still getting bigger, outgrowing beach ball size, but everything else was getting smaller. His arms were thin, his tiny breasts had just about disappeared, and his collarbones were jutting out. The life inside him was taking all the calories he could fit in and not leaving any for him, and it looked like it was stealing what it could from the rest of his body.

"Greg, honey," I shook him again. "Come on, please wake up. There's a juice box in it for you."

He made it mostly awake and started crying a little.

"Greg, shhhhh. Come on, don't wear yourself out. How can I help?"

"I'm hungry," he wailed. "But it's so hard to eat because there's no room." I knelt beside the recliner and held on to him until he was done crying, got him to work through some buttered toast by cutting it into inch-big squares that he sucked on until they dissolved in his mouth.

And I started tearing apart the whole damn house looking for those instructions Aunt Mavis had given me. My searches got increasingly desperate and bizarre. I read every piece of paper on the property. I checked in the attic. I pulled the stove out of the wall to look behind it. I did all these things and more, and then I'd go check on Greg and try to get him to eat a little bit more. I was less and less successful with that, as his belly grew.

We only made it a few weeks into that terrible, terrifying last month, but it seemed like a year. On the last day, I looked down into Greg's frighteningly thin face; he was asleep again, but he'd begun panting even in his sleep now, couldn't breathe any better than that. His color was bad. The tight, tight belly looked like a beanbag chair was forcing its way out of his body – he was stretched so badly that the skin and musculature above it on his chest and below it, over those still-thin hips, was tenting outwards to try to help keep his massive womb contained. The stretch marks he'd been so proud of were simply everywhere between his sternum and his thighs; he was a mass of veins and weals. We had officially entered crisis mode.

I went out to my truck. Those fucking instructions had to be in there somewhere. Somewhere. I tore out half the upholstery. I checked the engine block. I looked in the spare tire. I was looking in places that made absolutely no sense. I finally sat defeated on the front stoop, tearing up a little from the frustration, then got up to go see if my bursting husband was still breathing.

When I got back in the house, he wasn't in the recliner. I froze, then I heard him crying. I frantically tracked the source of the noise to the bathroom. Greg was sobbing on the floor, holding on to himself like he was trying to keep from exploding. Maybe he was. The lights in the bathroom were so harsh I had to catch my breath at just how bad he looked. His arms and legs had gotten so skinny I could see the edges of his joints through them, all of his ribs were visible, and his beautiful face looked gaunt. And then his belly. He was trying to lie on his side, but that huge sphere wouldn't let him. It bulged out so much to the side that it was pushing him on to his back – but it was also so heavy that it was keeping him pinned in place, halfway between the two positions.  It was probably good that he hadn't managed to roll all the way over; it might have just stopped him from breathing entirely with all that weight fully on his lungs.

I was frozen with horror, and then Greg stopped sobbing to throw up a little bile on the floor, and it jerked me into motion.

"Oh, honey," I said. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I wasn't here when you needed help." I got a washrag, wiped his face, and started shifting him. Jesus, he was heavy. Greg started shaking his head at me, crying and gasping too hard to talk.

"Okay," I said, trying to keep the panic out of my own voice. "Okay, just calm down." I sat myself on the bathroom floor and hauled up at him, pulling him into my body so he could sit halfway up and leaning to one side in his most comfortable position, using me like his recliner. He was nearly dead weight. I had to spread my legs wide, wide to get that monstrous belly between them, and my own pelvis ached as I got him settled. I held on to him, wrapped my arms around as much of him as I could. "It's okay," I promised him.  "Please calm down before you get too tired to talk to me." He didn't have the energy to cry for very long, and I couldn't even imagine what it had cost him to crawl in there, dragging a load far past half his own weight.

Even after he was done, though, he kept gasping. "It's not," he said.

"What's not, honey? Do you want to go back to the living room?"

"It's not okay, and you know it. This is wrong. This is so wrong." He stopped talking to pant a little. "I can't stand up. I can't eat. I can hardly breathe. I can't even lie down." It sounded like he was beginning to work his way back towards tears. "This is not supposed to happen."

I was afraid of how worked up he was getting. "Okay –" I started.

"It's not okay!" Greg yelled into my chest, and then wheezed uncontrollably for a while.

"No, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Shhhhhhhhh. You're right.  You're right."

"It hurts so much."

It made my heart ache. "I'm so sorry it hurts. What do I need to do right now to help it hurt less?"

"You've got to call her. You've got to call your aunt. I think I might die if you don't, Tony, I really do."

"I'll call her," I promised, and I meant it. To hell with it. This was now more terrifying than anything Aunt Mavis could do to me. "I'll call her right now. Do you want me to take you back to your chair first?" I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to pick him up.

"No, just call her," he whimpered. "Get me a pillow."

I thought about trying to put him in the tub so he could sit up a little better, but I didn't think he'd fit. Instead, I got him back to the floor as gently as I could, then raced quickly around the house to grab pillows.

"It's crushing me," he gasped when I got back, and I hauled him up again, shoved pillows around him, to give him the support he needed to get that massive weight off of him. He fell asleep, still panting, as soon as I'd stopped moving him around – at least, I was hoping he'd fallen asleep and didn't just faint. I raced for the phone, dialed.

"Aunt Mavis," I yelled, a little too loud, as soon as I heard someone pick up. "It's Tony! I know, I know what you're going to say, but I need your help! With the pregnancy!"

I realized that I didn't even know if it was her on the other end yet, and I held my breath. "Anthony," I finally heard her say, "I don't care."

"I know!" I was trying to hold back tears myself, now. "I know what you told me! But there's something really wrong!"

"I'm not a doctor. Call your doctor."

"I . . ." I was taken aback. "Which doctor?" I'd had a checkup about six months ago, but couldn't even remember the guy's name. I was so panicky that I couldn't even remember if Greg and I had the same one. I waited again.

"Anthony. If you – what is wrong with you?"

"I'm scared!"

"No," she said. "I mean, what is wrong with you? If you're the eager little beaver that I think you are, then you probably used what I gave you right away, didn't you? Which means that boy of yours must be just about due. And you've never taken him to see a doctor?"

I blinked stupidly at the kitchen wall. "I . . . I thought . . . the magic . . ."

"By all the wicked saints, you idiot boy! Magic or not, that man is pregnant. And he is a pregnant man, and he's got no hole, and he's not gonna get that baby out of him until someone cuts it out of him, just like any woman who can't get it out on her own! Didn't you read the damn directions I gave you?"

"Lost them," I said. I was starting to sob now. Oh, god, I'd fucked up, I'd fucked up, I'd hurt Greg so badly, and it was all my fault.

"I am going to flay you alive. What is . . . no, you know what? I am coming over before you destroy anything else that you touch." She slammed down the phone. I got a juice box out of the fridge and ran back to the bathroom, and sat miserably next to Greg, who still looked like he was asleep, taking quick, shallow breaths. I was afraid he was getting worse, but afraid to wake him to check; he was just so exhausted.

After a few minutes, though, he jerked himself awake. The panting turned into a wheeze again. "Tony?" he said.

"Hey," I said. "I'm right here." I rubbed his back. "Aunt Mavis is on her way, she really is." I hoped. "Greg, babe, do you think you can drink some of this?" I got the box in his hand and the straw in his mouth. He tried a couple of sips; they came back up.

"I can't," he said, miserably. "There's no room. Throwing up hurts."

I wiped his face again. "What can I do, honey? How can I help?"

"Hold me," he said, and put one arm up. I grabbed him out of the pillows and made myself his support again. We clung to each other, and he went to sleep again, still breathing hard.

That last stretch waiting for my aunt was the worst time in my life, worse than when either of my parents died, worse than hearing that dog's bones snap like pretzels. Greg was in and out of things, and I was starting to get worn out, myself, from trying to keep him comfortable – or at least in as little pain as possible. The worst part might have been the uncertainty of when she would get there, or what she would do, or what would happen to poor Greg and our poor children. The worst part might have been when I started to hate our kids, our babies, for what their terrible growth had done, was doing, to Greg.

Or the worst part might have been what I could feel happening in Greg's body, now that we were wrapped so closely together. Every time he took one of his shallow breaths, I could feel his huge belly quiver, as though it were trying to strain still farther outwards, make itself even bigger, take even more out of him. I thought I could hear it groaning from the stress. If I put any pressure on it, Greg would jerk awake for a second and whimper. It was excruciating for both of us, in different ways.

Finally, there was a knock. "Greg," I said, and started easing him off me, "I've got to put you down."

He was already awake from the movement. "No," he said.

"Honey, I've got to. I've got to let Aunt Mavis in." Greg nodded, and I got him into the pillows again.

I stumbled to the front door, my legs half-asleep from the position I'd been in. She was, blessedly, there, glaring at me. "All right, where's your boy?" she demanded.

I ran back to the bathroom, and she stalked along after me. She froze when she saw Greg on the floor – he was holding onto that obscene globe in agony – and she turned to me, her jaw clenching.

"Can you –" I started, and then she hauled back and punched me so hard in the face that I found out later she'd fractured my cheekbone. I went down like a ton of bricks.

"I will tell you," she called down at me, "When you get to talk." I was running on so much adrenaline that I managed to crawl back to the doorway and peer in as she dropped to her knees next to Greg. "Sweetheart," she said, and took both his hands. I don't think I'd ever heard her be that nice before. "What is your name?"

"Greg," he said. Oh god, he looked so tired.

"All right, Greg. I'm Mavis. I'm sure you're going through ten tons of hell right now. I want to look at you, all right?"

Greg nodded weakly, and Aunt Mavis immediately started pressing her hands all around that mind-bogglingly huge disaster of a pregnancy, prodding him. He moaned and jerked at her touch like she was burning him with those hands, and his breath turned back into that high-pitched wheeze.

"All right, sweet face," she said. "You know you've got more than one in there, right?" Greg nodded again. "I thought maybe I could help, but they are just too big for me to handle. They're too big for you to handle. We are gonna take a good old-fashioned emergency room trip. Do you think you can make it outside?"

Greg grimaced. "I don't know," he managed to get out.

"We're gonna give it a shot before we call the ambulance. You, you fool," she directed at me, "You get that goddamned truck of yours as close as you can." I pounded outside and pulled it up to the front door, left it running.

When I got back in, Greg's voice was wailing from the bathroom, and my heart sunk as I ran towards it. He and Aunt Mavis were in almost the same position on the bathroom floor; she was stroking his hair and shushing him while he clutched at himself. His belly looked like it was boiling, the contents shifting, the skin shaking.

"What did you do?" I demanded, and she shot me a look of such pure fury I'm surprised she didn't burn my brain straight out with it. I remembered that I wasn't supposed to be talking.

Greg started panting again, instead of screaming, and that huge belly of his kept moving. It was changing shape, stretching.

"All right, now, honey," Aunt Mavis said into his sweating face. "You got a little more room in there, yeah?" And to my surprise, he nodded at her. "Gonna be a trouble to walk," she continued, "But I bet you're used to that. We're gonna help you. You take a drink of whatever this crap is, and then we're going." She gave him the juice box I'd left there, and he took a swig, and then she started yanking up at him. I waited for him to throw up again, and he didn't.

"Anthony, you get yourself over here and help me fix your unforgivable mistake." I jumped forward, realized I'd just been staring uselessly. I got one of Greg's arms around my neck and worked him upwards, and she got the other, and we got all of him off the ground. He was moving his legs to try to come along with us, not very usefully, but he was moving them.

As we made it out the door, Greg's belly shifted out, and out, and down, and I realized what had finally happened: his hips had widened enough to let some of that weight drop down low. He told me later that it had been both surreal and excruciatingly painful: Aunt Mavis had apparently simply told him she was going to help him breathe better, then put her hands onto each of his hidden hipbones and stretched them apart like taffy. She didn't break them, just made them go . . . out, just a couple of inches, and all that pressure in him jumped around to fill that new space, wedged our babies into new places. He said he'd immediately pissed his pants, but it helped free up his lungs, and I guess he did keep that juice down. All I knew at the time was that his legs were so uncoordinated that it made him almost totally unable to do anything but try to keep his feet on the floor as we hustled him along.

"Hustle" being, of course, a relative term. Getting outside was like walking through molasses. We got the passenger side door of my truck open (Aunt Mavis demanded, panting herself now, as to why I hadn't thought to leave it open in the first place), and she backed in, pulling up on him, while I lifted from below. We ended up with her behind the wheel and him leaning his back against her, sideways across the seat, knees towards the door.

"I'm driving, Anthony," she snapped at me. "You ride cargo."

I got in the back of that shitty old truck just before she hit the gas. I don't think she was even waiting for me to get in, she was probably helping Greg turn over or something before she floored it.

I slid back and forth back there just like that mangled dead dog in my memory, almost mindless with fear.  I was peering through the rear window, hoping we wouldn’t get pulled over, because she was speeding and I was flailing so wildly in the back.  I think a little bit of my brain gave up, then, as my past and present and love and terror got all mixed up together.

At least, I think that's most of the reason the hospital itself was a blur. I don't know if Aunt Mavis was working some sort of magic charm again or just yelling so loud that people did what she said, but she got shit done. Somehow or other, she got Greg into a bed and stashed me next to him to keep holding his hands – he was still half-out of it, with the pain – and getting everyone to do what they had to, to get our babies out. And everyone did it with this great urgency, like it was just another emergency, nothing that strange about preparing to cut open a frighteningly pregnant man to remove a few live human infants from him. Nobody asked questions – not then, anyway. And I vaguely heard Aunt Mavis say something else beyond "cesarean," but at that point I was crying because they were taking Greg away and he still looked so scared, and I got pushed into a waiting room.

I just sat in there, shaking and staring at my feet, until a very nice nurse took me by the chin and asked me what had happened to my face, and could I tell her my name and what day it was. I couldn't remember the date, and I'd forgotten just how hard Aunt Mavis had hit me, so I had no idea what she was talking about with my face. So they stuck me in a bed, too, and gave me something that made me sleep.

I woke up still in panic mode, yelling, until someone remembered that I'd come in with Greg, and, to keep me quiet, they told me he was in recovery, getting better, and I couldn't see him just yet, but in a little bit. Then they told me about the triplets, and I flew barefoot and hospital-gowned all the way to the nursery, getting lost in oncology once on the way. I was a father. Two boys and a girl, all of them perfect and beautiful – they all are, aren't they, everyone's babies? – and all of them healthy as horses and roughly the size of Montana. The orderlies who tracked me down let me stay to stare through the window after I hugged them and begged hard enough. They told me I should probably do a better job tying up the back of my gown, though.

It took Greg a good while to recover enough to really talk and make any kind of sense. The doctors had done the cesarean, and they'd also taken out that big unnatural uterus that was filling up all of his body, and I knew somehow that Aunt Mavis had made them do it so that we'd never be able to have kids again. But at the time, I didn't care. I had three enormous babies that I held onto as long as they'd let me, and I dragged them into Greg's hospital room at every chance. Thank god we'd at least had the foresight to name each other on our medical forms.

That was when the questions started, really. Nobody at the hospital could figure out just how it'd happened or why the babies were so damn big – really large even for normal births, but for triplets, unbelievable – and questioned my claims that I was their father until Greg woke up enough to sleepily agree with me. We mostly just shrugged and said we didn't know, either, what all had just happened, and got yelled at a little.

I didn't take the kids home while Greg was still getting well enough to sit up and walk around and so forth, because it made him so happy to have them so close, and the hospital was still looking at me suspiciously anyway, so they didn't mind hanging on to them.

"Where's your aunt?" Greg asked after a couple of days. "I want to thank her for everything."

"I guess back at her place, but I don't really know," I said, truthfully. "You don't know how long it took me to even find my truck after that mess. And I don't think I'd better call her for a while."

She showed up at the hospital, though. I'd just gotten to Greg's room, and he was just waking up from another round of painkillers, and I was about to head down to the nursery to grab the kids – we were still fighting over names, because we'd never really settled on any when things started getting from bad to worse back at home. Now, Greg kept suggesting things like "Murgatroyd" and "Barbarella," and I was insisting that he wasn't allowed to have any hand in naming them as long as he was drugged up. Aunt Mavis walked into his room. I instinctively backed up a few steps; my face still looked like a sunset from where her fist had hit it.

"Those kids better be all right," she said.

"They're okay," Greg said, eagerly.

"No, I mean for the rest of their lives. You better take damn good care of them."

"Promise," I said. "Absolutely."

"I wanted to –" Greg started, and Aunt Mavis walked right up to his bed and slapped him in the face. Nowhere near as hard as she'd hit me, but there was a pretty good crack! involved.

"You tell me, too, you little fool," she said to him. "I want to hear it right from your own mouth. Tell me you will never be so stupid again in your life, and that you will never treat those kids as bad as you treated yourself for all those months."

He was stunned, one hand on his pink cheek – I can still see it, he was so skinny that he looked like an adorably shocked Stan Laurel – and looked at me like he couldn't believe I'd just let her do that. But I did, because she was right. And, well, also I was just as scared of her as when I was seven. More, now, maybe.

"I promise," he managed.

"You two deserve each other," she said. "And you don't deserve those babies, but it's not natural to keep children from their parents, so you get to keep 'em unless you screw up. I don't ever want to hear from you again, Anthony. We ever show up at another funeral together, you better stay the hell out of my way." And she turned on her heel and walked out.

Greg looked at me again, like he couldn't figure out what had just happened – he really was a little dopey from the drugs, still. "That is the most not natural woman I have ever met in my life," he said, and I had to laugh and kiss him.

We all got home eventually, all five of us. Things got hectic and weird and exhausting, but boy were they ever better. I even finally found those directions that Aunt Mavis had given me: they'd slipped through a hole in the pocket of the coat I'd been wearing, and had been hidden in the lining. I had to shake my head at myself again when I found them, printed in her straggling block capitals. There was no second magic spell, no incantation. Just a set of basic pregnancy instructions like out of one of those baby books – plus a whole section on how to find a doctor who'd help with a male pregnancy, and what that doctor needed to know to help things go smoothly: things about the uterus that would never go into labor, about the probability for multiples, about the babies that would grow fast and forever if they were allowed to, and even the stuff about the sex and not having boobs and everything we'd wrestled with. Just that. We really had been idiots for not going to see a doctor - even without the directions, it could have saved us so much torture.

Greg's got a swing in his walk that wasn't there before – those hips never did go back together all the way – and a little pooch in front, still, that he says he wouldn't get rid of for the world. And, of course, we've got our exhausting, beautiful, frustrating, unforgettable children. Two boys and a girl: Richie, and Adam, and Mavis.