Misfortune happens when one least expects it to, which the women from the Smith village would soon come to know very well. The village had existed for decades, and it had always looked like any other village. Its current mayor, the esteemed Terrence Smith, who had inherited the position from his father, who had inherited it from his father, the founder of the village, always seemed to deal with things perfectly. It was a beautiful and charming place, a lovely tourist attraction which people were always keen to visit, and it harboured no dark secrets within it, not until that fateful day...

Marianne Smith, the daughter of the mayor, woke up on a bright sunny day that appeared to be nothing short of mundane. After keeping her eyes closed for a couple more seconds because she didn't want to jump out of bed too suddenly, she opened them with much eagerness, ready for yet another brilliant day in her privileged life as the daughter of the mayor. She noticed a mysterious red flower on her nightstand, which she decided to ignore. 

However, as she tried to stand up, she found it far more difficult than she had anticipated for some reason. She felt a great burden on her shoulders, as though she had a large sack of potatoes tied to her back. It was most peculiar to her, so she cast a brief glance at her body, having no idea why it was so burdened. Upon noticing that her stomach had become much greater in size, and also hearing an unborn child crying in her womb, she let out an earpiercing scream. She did not care if she would wake someone up. None of this seemed real to her anyway.

"Marianne, what is going on?" her father asked from downstairs, his voice laced with concern.

She laid upon her bed like a corpse. She had no idea what to do.

"Marianne," he repeated. "Marianne. We have guests in the kitchen. Marianne. Do you hear me, Marianne?"

All of this was unbelievable to her. She could not find any signs of there being guests in the kitchen. A few seconds later, she heard several pairs of footsteps, all of them distinct.

"Marianne, we are coming upstairs," he announced, moving in the direction of the stairwell, the guests following him immediately.

Marianne's heart turned into a black hole as she listened to their footsteps incessantly. She saw nothing but evil and darkness before her eyes, even though she was in a luxuriously decorated room on a lovely day. Such terror overwhelmed her being that her mind still refused to process it, making it believe that it was nothing more than a nightmare she would soon wake up from. It had to be that way, right?

"Marianne, we are coming inside!" her father shouted from a much smaller distance than before, his tone of voice indicating that he did not much care for her opinion.

She was like a mouse trapped in a cage now. There was no escape, no relief from the tyranny that would surely torment her after this moment. She woke up pregnant, and she had no clue as to how it happened. No one else would believe it. At the age of eighteen, she would carry a child that she had not expected for a long time, a child that did not belong to her, and upon its birth, that child would haunt her for at least as many years as she was old at the time. 

But it was not her unplanned parenthood that worried her the most, grotesque as it was. It was the village, for reasons even a child would understand. She could not live after this moment, in the literal sense of it. She would not have to, given that she always hid a dagger in her drawer just in case. Carrying it tight in her hand, she crawled to the bathroom like a worm, not allowing herself to leave it ever again.

"Marianne!" her father screamed on the verge of tears, but she could not hear him. She could not hear anything anymore. He had the bright idea to enter the bathroom almost immediately after seeing her bed empty and unmade, and he was so horrified by what he saw that he collapsed onto the ground helplessly, his sharp voice devolving into a crescendo of wails. The guests were horrified too, but not horrified enough to muster more than pale faces, slight gasps, lingering stares, and curious whispers.

Marianne, his beloved daughter, had slit her throat in the bathroom, looking several months pregnant. He could not imagine a worse fate for himself. He loved her very much - by his standards, anyway - but it was himself that he was the most concerned about. She was the daughter of the mayor, and, as he viewed it, she had degraded herself into nothing more than a mere harlot who got pregnant and decided that she wanted no responsibility, taking the easy way out. She disgusted and tortured him. He had to restrain herself from vomiting.

"That filthy waste of a child," he hissed through burning tears as he stood up weakly, having to balance himself desperately on the sink so that he would not slip and fall.

"Sir, did you not consider that perhaps it was never Marianne's fault at all?" said a short man with brown hair and hazel eyes meekly.

Terrence glared at him. "Women do not get pregnant on their own, Alan."

"Exactly," Alan retorted. "Maybe she did not want to get pregnant."

"But she did," said Terrence, crossing his arms.

"Maybe she had her innocence taken without her consent," Alan said, waving his hands in a manner that said Are you really that oblivious? because he was already getting quite annoyed with him.

"No, she could not have," said Terrence, shaking his head. "I doubt she was ever as innocent as I had thought. If what you propose were the case, she would have told me, and I would have helped her. No, that earpiercing scream we heard today proves the opposite. Her pregnancy started to show, and she could not live with our judgment. If there is an afterlife, which there surely us, she has to know that we will judge her forever in her death, but try as we might, we will never be greater judges than the Lord. I hope He condemned her to Hell for her sins. She deserves nothing less than that."

"I do not want to participate in this conversation anymore," Alan said bitterly, marching out of the residence, leaving Terrence and his four remaining guests alone to judge Marianne for her apparent blundering.

"I did not know that she was such a harlot," said a similarly young woman with auburn hair and emerald eyes. She was Evelyn Fairfax, Marianne's childhood best friend. She too was a pure, innocent virgin, and she would come to know the weight of her judgment very soon.

The following day, she woke up in her ordinary bed in her ordinary house. After yawning and stretching her arms, the first thing that she saw was a mysterious red flower on her nightstand, but although it worried her a little bit, she did not take it too seriously. Then, she saw it. Her stomach had exponentially increased in size, and an unborn child was crying within her womb. She was four or five months pregnant without ever having had intercourse. The unreal horror of it made her scream immediately.

"Evelyn, are you alright?" asked her mother from the room next to her, her voice trembling with tears.

"Leave me alone!" Evelyn roared, obviously confusing her mother and hurting her feelings, but she could not handle it. All that she needed at the moment were solitude and silence.

She was pregnant today without having been pregnant yesterday, and she could not recall her vagina being entered. As far as she knew, signs of pregnancy were not this spontaneous even in normal circumstances, not at all. The only possibility that made any sense is that perhaps she had been drugged or assaulted in her sleep a while back, but her memory did not agree to it. She could not trust it anymore. And now half of a pregnancy still remained, and she would endure a painful birth, forced upon her by the laws of the village. For a split second, the image of Marianne slitting her throat in her bathroom flashed before her eyes, and everything made sense now.

"I am so sorry, Marianne, I am so sorry..." she wept desperately, kneeling on her bed in pure weakness and sorrow, so thoroughly focused on her sadness that she failed to hear the creak of her bedroom door and the echo of her mother's tall black boots as she steadily entered the room.

"Evelyn, what is going on?" her mother asked, hugging her before suddenly pulling back, slapping her in the face with much vigour. "You bloody harlot! Look at what you have done! I love you, but I cannot help but be ashamed of you!"

"You did not even... I did not... I did not mean to-"

"Keep crying about it!" her mother sneered, slapping her vigorously again. "What will your father say? You are lucky that our bakery is closed today, so you are not forced to work, but your father is coming back from his business trip tonight, and just you wait until he hears about this, young lady! I have no idea about how you feel, but I would bury myself six feet under if I were you."

"You did not ask me anything," Evelyn said darkly as she stood up from her bed. "You are jumping to conclusions, assuming that I willingly took my virginity behind your back, but I do not remember being pregnant yesterday, and I am completely unaware of how it came to be. I would love it if you believed me."

"Oh," her mother gasped, everything making complete sense as she analysed her daughter's recent behaviour in her head and realised that this strangeness had the most logic within the given context. "I am such a fool. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please remember that I love you."

Evelyn did not particularly admire the dryness and formality of her mother's apology, but it was better than nothing, so she decided to tolerate it. Her mother hugged her again, bursting into powerful sobs as she wrapped her hands around her waist, feeling the weight of her daughter's pregnancy in her hands.

"This is awful," she said, choking on her tears. "Why must Fate be so cruel? You did nothing to deserve such punishment. You will look so guilty in front of the village. You will become a social pariah, and I cannot stand it... We must get you to an abortion clinic before dawn. I had never thought of abortion as a particularly moral thing, but right now, it is the most moral thing to be done..."

As Evelyn sobbed along with her, tightly enclosed within her embrace, she sensed a dark pit of hollowness in her heart. Her mother loved her and was greatly worried about her, but clearly it was society that mattered the most in her eyes. Ever cruel and judgmental, society frightened even people like her mother, who gave their lives to it in the name of supposed progress, for it could turn against anyone in the blink of an eye when the time is right. One person did not matter in the eyes of the great and wide society. She hated the feeling of being pregnant so young and unprepared, and the idea of childbirth had always scared her, unbelievably so now that she would give birth to a child of assault, but evidently, it was completely irrelevant against the thoughts and feelings of society. It made her feel sick to her stomach.

"Quick, we must hurry!" her mother shouted, urging her out of the hug and rushing her out of the house the moment she gathered her money, the two of them proceeding to run like their feet were on fire.

They reached the abortion clinic at sunset, dropping to the ground from the sheer exhaustion that they felt. Desperately, they banged at the front door, begging to be allowed inside, even though they saw no one through the curtainless glass windows. Fortunately, there was a person located at the other side of the building, and they opened the door within a minute. It was a middle-aged woman in a starkly white uniform, her blonde hair neatly tied into a bun and her obsidian eyes hidden behind a pair of rectangular glasses with black edges, who smiled weakly at their sorry states, urging them to come inside.

"My name is Albinia Wright," she said solemnly right after closing the door, slowly leading them through the sterile white halls of the clinic. "I am the head nurse and founder of the Smith Abortion Clinic, and for seven years now, I have helped young women in need, such as your daughter, without judgment. In this oppressive society, women need all the help that they can get, and I have provided much of it to them, as indicated by all the stellar reception my clinic has been given throughout the years. In fact, I am certain that you must be here because of it. 

There is a free room at the end of the hallway, which we will reach soon. I see that you are both afraid, especially you, young lady, and I cannot imagine what it must be like to be in your position, but I see no reason for fear. Abortion is no laughing matter, but trust me, it is not as scary as you might think. You will deprive yourself of a huge responsibility that you did not want, and you will have a future after this, you will have children and a family and it will be as though nothing happened in the first place. Let us enter now."

And enter they did. Evelyn did not care to observe her surroundings much, but she observed them well enough to know that it was a perfectly sterile hospital room with a large black operating table in the middle, its surface separated from the floor only by three stairs.

"Take your clothes off and lie down on the table," Albinia said calmly, and Evelyn instantly did as she said, though not without the scary feeling of being watched and studied.

"Now take a deep breath and close your eyes," Albinia continued as she gathered her equipment. "I will give you anaesthesia, and it will not last long, but I want you to be as calm as possible. Do you understand?"

Evelyn nodded quickly, after which everything went black because of the anaesthesia. She woke up after an unknown amount of time, completely unaware as to what was going on. In the following few seconds, as she became more and more capable of seeing and hearing things, she understood everything.

"She is awake," Albinia said, shaking her head. "This is not good."

"Twenty minutes have passed!" Evelyn's mother wailed, flailing her hands. "You failed to do anything! This is a disaster!"

As Evelyn's gaze fell towards the floor, she noticed a deep cut on her stomach that stopped abruptly, as though Albinia's equipment simply fell out of her hands in the middle of the process. It might very well have been so, given that all of it was scattered randomly on the floor of the hospital room, which was ruined. Defeated, Evelyn gradually set her tears loose from her eyes, her vision becoming blurry as her view of the world, in which she was completely helpless.

"Mrs and Miss Fairfax, I understand that you are upset, but Evelyn's body resisted my equipment. I do not know what it is, but we must not give up. When you wipe your tears, Miss Fairfax, we shall try again," Albinia tried to reason, but Mrs Fairfax merely glared at her and pushed her daughter away.

"I saw it," she said darkly. "This is a disastrous clinic! Your equipment literally fell out of your hands while you were operating! Where is your professionalism? Your business will never thrive in these conditions."

Speechless, Albinia was left alone as the mother and daughter left, all of them quite miserable. Albinia had always been able to help everyone, but her hands froze any time she tried to do anything to Evelyn's body, as though the universe itself was against it. Mrs Fairfax feared the lack of another clinic and the wrath of her husband that would surely ensue. Evelyn was the most miserable by far, way more miserable than she ever could have imagined, repulsed by the thought of having to carry her mysterious pregnancy to term. Logically, neither of them noticed the strange red flower beside the operating table, which they would come to regret later.

"Where have you been?!" roared a deep voice from inside the Fairfax house as Mrs Fairfax and Evelyn approached the front door late at night, crouched like repenting nuns. "No one came for me at the train station."

"Mother, please speak to him..." Evelyn said while choking on her tears, standing still as a statue as her mother opened the door.

Her father stood sternly, the disgust on his face as he glimpsed his daughter's pregnant body impossible to describe. "You harlot! You were foolish for thinking that you could hide this from me!"

"Justin, please let me in," Mrs Fairfax said weakly, only to be left alone in the dark and cold after Justin slammed the door in her face, hopeless as she listened how intensely her husband and daughter argued.

"Pregnancies do not happen on their own!" he shouted at some point during the conversation, and Mrs Fairfax could not take it anymore after what seemed to be half an hour. She burst in like a hurricane, stunning both of them.

"She is not guilty, Justin! I do not know how, but she is not! Leave her alone!" she yelled, dragging her daughter upstairs.

"I will see you both in the morning," he grumbled more to himself than to them, leaving them alone after that.

But word spread soon. Other pure, innocent virgins of similar age started getting pregnant in their sleep, mysterious red flowers left on all their nightstands, and all those who treated their daughters badly when it first came around had to seriously reconsider their behaviour. As everyone in the Smith village panicked, fearing just how grave it could become, all women who got pregnant unexpectedly being sent to clinics to be studied en masse, Terrence Smith fell into a crisis, especially after this note fell into his hands from the night sky:

"Dear humans,

We are the population of the Agnalia race. This is our invitation for peace and union. For decades, we have studied human cultures so that we could assimilate with this infant species that has a lot of potential. As you can see, we have already started creating perfect heirs in this small village as a test so that we could make the process easier. It is painless to your women, given that we impregnate them in their sleep. They are the best hosts for our descendants in this galaxy, especially pure, innocent virgins around the age of eighteen, for these beautiful creatures have an organ called a vagina, which is very convenient to us.

Their eggs are very fertile, particularly during this age, and the fluid that flows from our tentacles, being perfectly able to act as male sperm when needed, was put to good use. The test is going rather well so far, thus the rest of the world will soon join you, and we would love it if you accepted peace, for war would be difficult for both sides to handle. This is why we gave you both the Agnalia flowers - named after our beautiful planet - and this note. They are the symbols of fertility and life, symbolising our stark rejection of death. Our children will be born even from women who die during the process, but you cannot kill them. Act wisely. Please do not resist.

Sincerely,

The Agnalia Council"

Terrence was mortified after reading this note and wished solely to burn it, but he knew what he had to do. He called a meeting and read the note in front of the whole village, who screamed at the top of their lungs, calling for war with the aliens. However, what troubled his mind the most was his poor Marianne. Four months had passed since she slit her throat in the bathroom, which meant that the pregnancy was likely to come to term soon, and he wept desperately as he ran to her grave, carrying her dagger with him, burdening himself with the horrible task of cutting her body into pieces.

"Marianne," he wept on the soil before her grave, seeing nothing but war and despair in the bleak morning skies, kissing her tombstone gently. "I am so sorry. I wish I had known better than to judge you. Perhaps we all would have had more time to evade the aliens if our first instinct had not been to judge our daughters. There will be war now, a wretched war, and to deprive the aliens of at least one ally, I must cut your body into pieces. That demon must not come to life from your defiled body, and thus, I say goodbye. Please remember that I love you."

He cut her body with much agony, and he would remember it forever. He was now the mayor of a village whose men for the most part had harshly learnt to see the world beyond themselves, whose women could not sleep out of fear of assault, their fates sealed when their bodies finally became deprived of energy, and whose humans of all kinds seemed to be doomed to a blighted, wartorn future from which there was no salvation. It would not matter to him if the place burnt. In the Smith village, nothing mattered anymore, and he could only hope for humanity's future beyond these walls, a a final and desperate future for Earth.