Katy Beth Young is a writer, researcher and musician from London. She has released four albums with her band Peggy Sue and is currently working on a collection of essays about romance, grief, technology, and songwriting. One of her stories was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and her writing has appeared in Horrid Covid and HUCK Magazine. ‘The Harvest’ is a short story about friendship, IVF and chosen family.

Contact: Katybethyoung@gmail.com

The Harvest

1.

The day you were conceived was an icy Saturday surrounded on all sides by other people’s traditions. Lunar New Year to the left, from which we borrowed dumpling soup and Hong Kong cinema, and Valentine’s to the right, from which we took nothing at all. As the alpine-cold air froze the empty morning streets, the first of your mothers harvested twelve eggs. Enough for pancakes we joked, once she was back home in bed with your other mother, sipping at a bowl of cream of tomato soup.

2.

All that year, all across the country, a generation with little else to do in the evenings was accidentally conceiving middle children on living room floors, as the news unraveled eternally in the background. By the following summer there would be more newborns on the internet than parakeets in London. But inside the house on Third Street, there could be no accidents – only spreadsheets and moral dilemmas. ‘What date does Virgo end again?’ asked your second mother. ‘Do you think we can write to the anonymous donor and introduce ourselves?’ asked your first.

The reason I was there, a strange witness to the many seeds of you being gradually sown and methodically waited on, was that I was also waiting, though I wasn’t sure for what. I had lost my father in the spring, and with him, my already precarious sense of direction. I spent the summer playing Take Me Home, Country Roads on my Dad’s guitar and mispronouncing Shenandoah River. The song served me well, but as the nights grew longer, it became clear that Americana alone wasn’t going to cut it. Your mothers, seeing the shortcomings of my current coping mechanism, invited me to spend the winter.

I moved in shortly before Halloween and settled myself into the soft spaces of their life. I took their baths and finished their leftovers and lay at their feet in front of the television with the cats. I tried to keep my own waiting mostly confined to my bedroom by filling it with clearly unfinished tasks: curtains draped and waiting to be hung, new books stacked and waiting to be read, clothes piled up and waiting to be put away. In this way, I thought I could wait out the season, while time moved toward the far-end of the spreadsheet and the column marked ‘birthday?’.

3.

‘First I’ll cook one of Teresa’s eggs and then, in a year or so, she’ll cook one of mine,’ said your mother Frances, as she stirred the tomato sauce with one hand and poured the water over the pasta with the other. ‘That way when everyone chooses favourite children it will only be for absolutely pure reasons – like how funny they are and whether they are good at football.’ Frances’ hair was very long then and dyed almost black. She had pulled it tight into a high ponytail before getting started on dinner, and it swung from side to side as she dashed around the kitchen for oregano and salt and capers.

Teresa, your other mother, laughed as she squeezed the juice of a lemon into the salad dressing. Then she looked over at me from the kitchen counter, round blue eyes widening beneath her neat brown pageboy hair. ‘I’m sorry Annie,’ she said, small wrinkles of concern forming between her brow, ‘this is not what you signed up for.’ But I shook my head. ‘I’ll be able to say – I knew you when you were this small,’ I said. I narrowed the space between my thumb and forefinger until they almost touched. I planned to love you from the inside out, like a bridesmaid loves a wedding.

According to the spreadsheet, Teresa was going first, so she waited for blood. She waited, as we always did, through two nights of cold sweats, one day of black mist and a small flood of tears. Usually while we waited, we said things like ‘I hate absolutely everything’ and ‘I’m not leaving the house today’. But this waiting was different, because this time the blood meant not only the sweet relief of clarified emotions, but also, eventually, the beginning of you.

Once the blood started, Teresa took the Underground back and forth to the city for scan appointments. Twice a day she took a dose of follitropin from among the cherry tomatoes in the vegetable drawer, lifted her sweatshirt and injected it into the soft skin of her stomach. On the first evening, over big bowls of fish stew, your mothers recounted how the first injection had been a comedy sketch of nerves and shrieks of laughter. ‘I had to hold her wrists down to stop all her wriggling,’ said Frances. After that everything went smoothly. Two weeks and three scans later, your mothers got the go-ahead to collect you. Teresa ordered an early morning taxi as we waited for the takeaway.

That night, before the icy morning on which you were harvested, I dreamt of a flock of birds as small as insects. I woke to find the white walls of my bedroom tinted a strange purple – a mix of the pinkening morning sky and the bright blue security lights from the driveway opposite. I padded out to the hallway and wished your mothers good luck from the top of the stairs. Then I returned to bed and dozed in and out of sleep. I dreamt of gulls with wingspans broader than apartment buildings. When I woke again the cats were running up and down the stairs in search of your mothers.

4.

Things that reminded me to take my contraceptive pill in my twenties: perfectly cooked soft-boiled eggs; fits of tears; my tits in the bathroom mirror; the thought of my boyfriend going down on me; Aneurysm by Nirvana; nosebleeds.

Things that reminded me to take my pill in my thirties: articles about abortion rights in America; video calls with my niece; letters about my missed smear test; flirting with my 24-year-old colleague; The Valley by Miguel.

5.

On Valentine’s morning, the day after you were fertilised, we were all up early with the cats, who were up early with the birds. The cold front was passing and the world outside the house smelt revived, like greens defrosting on the counter. The clinic called. I hung back upstairs as the good news rose out of the speakerphone. The vial from the Colombian donor, who may or may not have been a music teacher called Alessandro, had come through big time. Ten fertilised eggs. I imagined a full crop of babies: a crowd of you racing up and down the stairs like the cats. I joined your mothers in the kitchen and we buttered toast and poured milky coffee. ‘Well done!’ I said to Teresa. ‘Ten eggs!’ she said, glowing just as though they were all inside her.

The next week and the frost was completely gone. In the mornings the sun poured into my bedroom around the curtains like thick yellow paint and in the evenings the moon climbed up proudly into one window or another. The clinic called with more good news. Seven embryos and we’ll keep trying on the others, they said. ‘A little Von Trapp family,’ said Frances. We eyed the patterned curtains.

 6. 

More doses came by special delivery and topped up the supply in the vegetable drawer. Frances took over the scans and the daily injections and set her body to work on the next harvest. Over dinner, she worried how to explain her upcoming absences to her team at the hospital. In the end, despite best laid plans, she blurted out ‘non-invasive procedure’ to her bosses in the corridor one day. We imagined them studying her face on the sly forever-more – looking out for missing wrinkles or a more tender pout.

Meanwhile, follicles multiplied endlessly inside of her. Twenty, then forty, then fifty-five egg cells, and a whole weekend to get through before their collection. Dozens and dozens of your brothers and sisters. Frances placed her hands on her stomach and said: ‘My ovaries are as big as two mangoes’. She held her breasts as she ran down the stairs: ‘God my boobs are massive.’ She lifted her T-shirt in the evening as we watched the television and laughed: ‘Why do I always have to be such an overachiever!’

That night, while your family was growing exponentially, I dreamt that Japan was an island in the middle of the Thames; that you got there by stepping out onto a vast path of plastic floats, and that, careful as I am in both dreams and waking life, I had never been.

7. 

The previous summer, after my Dad died, I sat in my Mum’s garden and tried to keep still while she told me about the money he had left each of us. When she saw I had managed to soak up the information, and that none was likely to ricochet back off of me uncontrollably, she asked: ‘Have you thought about freezing your eggs?’ 

‘Not now Mum,’ I said.

 8. 

The day of Frances’ final injection the sun was low and warm. Your mothers and I spent the afternoon sprawled out across inherited blankets on the grey roof, hair-speckled limbs and winter-pale bellies out. We leant the floral sofa cushions against the pebble dash wall and pretended to read, glowing with the first pink cheeks of the year. We indulged in every distraction. Frances called out compliments to the old Greek neighbour about the fresh blossom on his white cherry tree and heckled the pigeons that were fucking in the big leylandii. We read headlines to each other off our phones, books open on our laps.

As evening came, Teresa climbed back in through the window and practiced the piano. Who Knows Where the Time Goes she played around and around. I sang along with the chords as they descended into the chorus. The cats took turns gazing up at the gulls and peering over the edge of the wall as Teresa’s gentle falsetto grew more confident with every loop. ‘Before the winter fire,’ she sang. ‘I will still be dreaming. I have no thought of time.’

Monday morning was the first of March. In the clinic, the nurses collected thirty-four eggs from Frances and from that made twenty-two fertilised embryos. ‘What is twenty-two?’ she asked, over the rising whistle of the kettle. ‘Two football teams?’ Teresa offered.

9.

Spring approached. I was nearing a year since my losses began and part of my Dad’s pension had been transferred into my bank account. The money sat there waiting to be dealt with properly, same as the clothes on the bedroom floor that I stepped around and the morning coffee cups I collected over the week. When people asked me how I was in those months, it was both easy and true to say ‘OK’, and impossible to explain that most days, once or twice, I thought about this – that nobody knew what my Dad’s favourite Bob Dylan song was.

I knew that your mothers didn’t quite understand but only because it was just last year that I myself hadn’t understood. Even now I only knew a little about my own losses, let alone anyone else’s. But they let me turn off films halfway through and danced with me in the kitchen when I turned songs up loud on the radio. And whenever I started to tell a story they were quiet and still and didn’t mind when it didn’t have much of an ending.

‘I played this to Dad last year,’ I said, when the new Dylan song came on one morning. Dad had rolled his eyes and said ‘What is he going on about for ten minutes? Why doesn’t he get to the point?’ Annoyed at the predictability of it all, I rolled my eyes right back and asked him what the last Dylan album he’d liked was anyway. ‘Blood on the Tracks,’ he said. We’d both laughed a little. And your mothers laughed too.

The end of the story went like this: I tried to get him to drink another sip of water.

 10.

When a body isn’t working

you see how hard it works 

 11.

With your family now in the safe and sturdy hands of the clinic, your mothers and I made a plan to leave the city for the first time in months. We would drive to the coast to visit two friends, loaded up with gifts from the Chinese supermarket. When we got there we would walk to the shoreline and put our hands in the cold sea. We would take deep breaths of country air walking in-land among the rotting cabbages.

The clinic called while we were making our way slowly around the huge aisles. The trolly was already piled up with multipacks of sesame seed rice cakes and plastic bags of fortune cookies. Frances wandered ahead to talk and when we caught her up in the canned goods aisle, she said ‘Guess how many embryos,’ her fingers already pointing downwards. We guessed twenty-one, eighteen, twelve. ‘Seven,’ she said, ‘same as you Tee’. We all agreed this was a much more reasonable number. Even if your mothers and I didn’t know what to do with that many possibilities, the clinic certainly would. We added a vacuum pack of bamboo shoots to the trolly and headed for the seaside.