Aaron tossed and turned in discomfort.

When the boar first started medical school, he naively thought his job would be easy - go to work, catch a few babies, head home. As it turned out, the life of a neonatal nurse was a lot more complicated. There was so much equipment to learn, so many medications to memorize, and so many patients in the NICU that weighed heavily upon his mind, day after day. There was so much time spent charting and entering data for symptoms, dosages, side effects, examinations, anything and everything that happened between the time the baby was born and the time it was discharged. The shifts were long - Aaron found himself at the hospital for twelve, sixteen, or even twenty-four hours at a stretch. It was during one of these stretches that he found himself trying to steal a nap in the on-call room while one of his patients was in labour - or maybe she wasn't. Last he heard, they were waiting to see if she needed a c-section. He had long since lost track of time. He was hungry and tired and needed to pee all at once, but he felt too full and too stressed to do any of those things. So he laid in the on-call bed and tried to sleep.

The on-call room itself was tiny, about ten feet long and maybe five feet wide, just room enough for a single bed, a desk with a computer for charting, and a sink with a mirror to freshen up. It looked like a cross between a hotel room and a prison cell. A window dominated the wall at the end of the room, with an ancient a/c unit just below. The aging appliance was too loud for Aaron to sleep with it on, but it was too hot to sleep with it off. So he compromised, trying to cool down the room as much as possible before he turned if off and crawled into bed. It wasn't long before he started to sweat, and then he began to dream.

The air inside the hut in Aaron's dream was thick and heady, saturated with dirt, sweat, blood, and other bodily fluids. It was dark and hazy, and Aaron had a hard time seeing. He waved his hand in front of his face to try and clear the air, and he was greeted by three silhouetted figures, two standing and one kneeling between them. They looked porcine at first, but on closer inspection they had more in common with two-legged warthogs than they did with 'modern' porcines like Aaron. They all had diamond-shaped ears and long, flat faces, almost like shovels, with ivory tusks protruding out and up on either side underneath of their round, flat snouts. The ones standing on either side were blurry and impossible to define, but the figure in the middle quickly came into focus.

The kneeling figure was female, and very pregnant. Aaron was first drawn to a pair of heavy, sagging breasts held up by a massive, low-hanging belly with a navel that stuck out like a thumb. Her entire body was covered in rough bristles instead of fur, like a gigantic humanoid scrub brush. These bristles changed to hair on top of her head, but it looked more like a horse's tail that trailed down her back. She was wearing a wrap that covered her legs and reached almost down to the ground, and she was gripping a knotted, frayed rope that hung down from the ceiling. Instead of fingers, Aaron noticed, she had two thick, hoof-like digits supported by a thumb.

Aaron was seized by curiosity, and quickly approached the warthog-woman, kneeling down to her level and gazing at her midsection. It was round and heavy-looking, and moved up and down with each breath the mother took. He could just make out a dark vertical line on her grey-brown skin through the bristles. He needed to know what was inside. He rubbed his hand along her belly and all of a sudden he could see through it, like he was wiping fog off a window. Inside was the vague, shadowy shape of a fetal humanoid, but more than that he couldn't tell. He moved his hand and the fetus followed, turning and somersaulting in place, like its limbs were attached to his hand through invisible strings. He was trying to see whether it was a boy or a girl, but even after examining the unborn baby from all angles he was no closer to defining its sex. The only way to find out would be after it was born, and Aaron needed to know.

Suddenly, he was no longer staring through the warthog-woman's belly, but down at it from her shoulders. she was kneeling on a mound of straw inside this dark hut - or was it a cave? - and he was behind her, one arm around her chest for support and the other between her legs, under the wrap. He looked around, the other figures were still there, watching and waiting, but Aaron knew they couldn't see what his hand was doing under the woman's wrap. He could feel the insides of her thighs, soft and covered in peach-fuzz, and then a wet, bulging head. He could feel the mother trying to push it out, but he kept his hand in place, savouring the spongy wet sensation against his palm. He felt and heard fluid squirt out as the mother pushed and he held his hand firmly against the head, waiting for the contraction to subside so he could push it back in, letting more fluid dribble onto the ground. No one could see what he was doing, he reminded himself, looking up at the other figures, and the mother certainly didn't seem to mind. 

Before the next contraction hit, Aaron started rubbing his finger in little circles, first on the baby's head, feeling what felt like slick, matted-down hair, and then spiralling outwards until he was sliding his fingers along the mother's stretched labia. He could feel the mother breathing, her belly expanding and contracting as she huffed. He rubbed his fingers faster as the mother's breathing intensified until she pushed again and another jet of slippery fluid coated her thighs. Still, Aaron didn't let the head go. He pushed it back slightly, shoving his fingers into the tiny gap between the baby's head and the mother's flesh and started rubbing the little bead of flesh at the top, digging his fingers in to try and compete with what he imagined was the overwhelming pain and pressure.

The mother panted and grunted, each time she pushed Aaron would push back, until finally the mother gasped and there was a surge of pressure that Aaron couldn't stop. He felt the mother's entire body clench up and all of a sudden the head in his hands had been shoved out to the shoulders. This baby was coming out and it was coming out now, he thought, and held the primitive woman against him tighter with one hand while he gripped the baby's shoulder with the other and fished his finger into what felt like the baby's armpit to try and lead it out and onto the straw. The mother was still panting and gasping for breath but managed one single orgasmic push to eject the rest of the baby onto the ground in a waterfall of fluid.

Aaron could feel the soft, slimy newborn even though it was still hidden from view under the mother's opaque wrap. And as long as he couldn't see, he knew the other watching figures couldn't see either. He felt around the baby's face and neck, down its sticky chest as it rose and fell, and in between its fat little legs until he found a wrinkly scrotum and a smooth, flaccid shaft. He jerked on the shaft feverishly, trying to look like he was still fumbling to grip the baby and pull it out. He didn't know how much time he had, but it couldn't have been very long before the watching figures would start to notice.

When Aaron felt like he couldn't get away with molesting the baby any longer, he clumsily scooped up the writhing bundle from under the woman's wrap and pulled out - a whelp?

No, Aaron thought, that wasn't right. The newborn he was holding in his hands was canine, mostly white with black spots. It was also a she, he noticed, with a pinkish, engorged spade between her legs. She also had no umbilical cord, until it occurred to Aaron that she ought to have had one, and then one suddenly appeared on her belly as if it had been there the whole time. It wasn't what he was expecting, but he certainly wasn't disappointed! He took a moment to quickly run his hand along her chubby thigh, and he couldn't help but stare a little too long at that fat puppy belly. He couldn't wait to give her her first exam! He looked up to gauge the reactions of the mother and the other figures around her, only to find himself in a much busier and more active place than he was before. 

Now people were everywhere - walking, talking, looking, minding their own business but just engaged enough to make Aaron feel exposed and vulnerable. It felt like a house party, or a crowded city sidewalk, or a university hallway between classes. He didn't mind being surrounded by people, it was an exciting feeling for him in certain situations, but this was too much. He felt surrounded, closed-in, and he felt a need to get this pup in his arms somewhere private before people started asking questions. He got up and walked quickly through the crowd, trying to keep a grip on the slimy, naked newborn, but he could feel it getting heavier and heavier in his arms, and then it started to kick and squirm. He was afraid he was going to drop her. He looked down and tried to adjust his grip only to find that he wasn't holding a pup any longer, but a large anthropomorphic foal, with long spindly legs and a rich chestnut coat. He quickly peered between the newborn's thighs to see that he was still holding a girl, although now the baby had a dark, teardrop-shaped vulva. He tucked the filly into the crook of his arm and gripped her legs with his other hand to keep her from flailing out of his grip, all the while trying to keep his head down and ignore the bustling crowd as much as he could. 

He needed shelter, stability. A corner to duck around, a door to close, a flat surface to put this newborn on before the opportunity passed, but everywhere he looked there were more people; shadowy, indistinct figures that closed in on him from all sides. Every time he looked around there seemed to be more of them, until he was so crowded in he felt like he was swimming upstream through a school of fish, fighting for every inch of space. He kept looking, and he saw a flash of movement through the crowd. One figure was different, doubled over in pain with her hands on her knees. The figure was a pale-furred feline with darker spots, wearing a pastel-yellow dress that draped down just below her knees. Aaron swore he could see a dark stain on the back of the dress, and it looked like something was dripping onto the ground. 

Aaron knew full well what was happening - the pose, the sounds, it was all very familiar to him. He rushed to assist, his nursing instincts taking over as he momentarily forgot about the newborn already in his arms. He arrived just in time to catch the leopard-lady's kitten as it dropped from between her legs with a splash. One second later and he would have been too late! He looked around and up at the mother only to find more swollen, pregnant figures surrounding him - some leaning against walls, or laying down with their legs spread, or squatting like frogs. Some of them were already reaching down to catch their own babies. This was too much. He looked down at his newest catch, the white-furred leopard kitten, and it let out a high-pitched mewl. Then it let out another. And another. And another. It sounded like . . . beeping?

Aaron opened his eyes and kicked out, feeling the resistance of the tightly-tucked sheets. His pager was going off. He was soaked with sweat, and his knuckles hurt from gripping the sheets. His pager was still going off. He reached over and fumbled for the device still attached to his scrubs. It was the local for the anesthesiologist - it seemed like the patient from earlier was getting a caesarean after all, and Aaron was needed to assist the neonatal team. He breathed a sigh of relief. He didn't remember much about his dream, but he got the impression that dealing with one infant was a lot easier than what he just went through.