Edge of Madness, Beauty of Death (preg, cons, snuff, lac, MF + g-2yo + g-unborn) Screams filled the air of the small African town of Nyarubuye. In less than two weeks, Rwanda had exploded with tribal hatred, as politicians seeking power fanned old hatreds for their own purposes. Now, in the marketplace, there was screaming and shooting as Hutus targeted Tutsis, with no regard for the friendships that had developed after years of relative peace. Checkpoints dotted the dirt roads into town, manned by teenaged Hutus with drugs in their blood and murder in their eyes. Kagame had seen a lot of wars in his forty years, but something in their look told him that there was more than just the usual tribal politics. Taking the back roads from the capitol, he had been able to get to within 10 miles of Nyarubuye before running out of bribe money, closer than he expected. The boys didn't care about the money because they wanted blood. His money would not help this close to town anyway. The locals knew that Kagame, a Hutu town council member, had taken a Tutsi wife. He did not know if he would be safe returning home, but knew he had to try to get Uwizera out of town soon. Their second baby was due in less than a month, and he had left Kigali to take Uwizera and their 2-year-old daughter, Amahoro, to somewhere, anywhere safe. But the cries from the center of town told him that time was running out. The sound of the not so distant melee was the only sound to be heard as Kagame stumbled out of the brush into the small garden behind his house. The back door was locked from the inside, there was no key because nobody ever locked their doors. As Kagame turned to the sound of a rifle shot in the nearby woods, the door flew open, and a strong but delicate hand pulled him in. Uwizera quickly shut and bolted the door behind her husband. She was tall, even for a Tutsi. At nearly two meters, her slender curves had drawn Kagame's eye, even when his Hutu friends looked at her with disdain. Now, eight months into her second pregnancy, her curves had truly blossomed, with a firm, round belly riding high below breasts that had found their true shape. Two years of nursing Amahoro had turned her breasts from a young woman's small and perky boobs into a full-grown woman's source of pleasure and baby's nourishment. After bolting the door, Uwizera darted to the kitchen of the small house. Kagame followed, looking at the shades drawn across the closed windows. The heat was stifling, and he wondered why Amahoro was not crying. When he reached the kitchen, he saw why. For the first time, he noticed that Uwizera's plain white dress was splattered with bright red blood, making strange, curved streaks around her swollen abdomen. As Kagame watched, she sat in a rocking chair made of local bamboo (splattered and streaked with red), and carefully pulled a breast out of the nursing slit. Then, she reached into the cradle, the cradle they had bought for the new baby, and picked up their daughter. Placing the girl to her breast, Uwizera began singing a lullaby as she rocked her gently to sleep. The girl was already asleep, Kagame suddenly realized, and she would not wake up. Slowly, he took in the sight of his wife's long, slender arms holding their chubby daughter, and blood still oozing from a spot on her back, between her ribs. Uwizera continued looking down at the dead girl, and spoke in a flat, emotionless voice. "They are coming for us. They would have hurt her. They would have taken her from me and killed her so slowly..." Her voice trailed off as Kagame knelt beside the pregnant mother and her dead child. "Who is coming?" Kagame asked. Uwizera looked up with a piercing glare. "Your people," she said, "They will kill you for being with me, then they will kill me as they laugh. They will kill our baby as they laugh..." she trailed off again. Tears came down her cheeks as her gaze moved to the chopping block. There was the knife, the bloody knife she had used to save her daughter from the Hutu mob. Kagame followed her gaze. "There is no escape for us," Uwizera said. They looked at the knife for a long moment, as the gunfire and screams continued in the distance. It was a heavy survival knife, the one Uwizera kept sharp to gut and clean the wild game that was the source of much of the family's meat. Then, their eyes met again. "You know what you must do," she told her husband. He remembered back to the time they had been hunting together, and had come across a colobus monkey that had somehow fallen out of its perch. Upon skinning it, they had found her pregnant, and there had been something especially satisfying about opening up her still-warm stomach to see the baby inside. Afterwards, they had made love like never before, and little Amahoro was the product of that passion. Kagame looked down again at his daughter, and the blood streaking the white covered curves of Uwizera's belly, and then looked in her eyes again. The blank stare was gone, replaced by the passion he'd seen on that day almost three years ago. He leaned over to kiss her, and they enjoyed a final moment together of pure love. As he pulled away, Uwizera placed Amahoro's warm body in his arms. He stood, took the knife from the counter, and then laid his daughter on the floor. With a single stroke, he opened the bottom of her ribcage from her left to her right, angling the knife upward to cut through the diaphragm. Gently, he reached his left hand inside her body, then carefully entered with the knife in his right. As Uwizera watched, he pulled the girl's severed heart from her chest, and offered it to his wife. She took it in her hand, and toyed with the ragged hole made by her knife. Still holding her daughter's heart, she rose heavily from the chair, and lay down beside the little girl on the hard floor. Kagame took the bloody material of the hem of her dress in his hand, and cut upwards, over her belly, between her breasts, and up to her neck. He cut down her right sleeve, then reached across to open the left, and his pregnant wife now lay before him naked on a bloody white sheet. He cut off her right sleeve, and wrapped it around her head. "You will scream," he said, the first words he had said since coming home to death. "I know," she said. He placed the gag in her mouth, and tied it firmly. Taking the knife in his right hand, Kagame positioned himself between his wife's legs. He bent over her expanding belly, and gently took her coal black nipple between his lips. He sucked the breast, the one his daughter died clutching, until hot, sweet milk streamed out. As Uwizera moaned softly in pleasure, Kagame felt the baby kicking happily below him. Reaching down around her belly with his left hand, he stroked the coarse hairs of her vulva, then moved to the folds that had birthed Amahoro. Gently moving his fingers up and down her labia, Kagame could feel his wife's long, muscular body swaying beneath him. As she neared her climas, Kagame lay his full weight on the baby, feeling Uwizera's swollen navel pushing into his ribs. He moved his fingers faster, focusing on her clitoris, as her breathing came faster and faster. He felt her stomach contract around the baby as her uterus prepared for orgasm. Uwizera took a deep breath as the sensations overcame her, and Kagame took one long, hard suck of her breast milk. Then, he placed the tip of the knife at the point of her sternum, and pushed it in with a single, steady thrust. Uwizera let out her breath with a muffled cry, still loud through the gag, but much of the air in her lungs blew out of the hole in her stomach, where Kagame had angled the knife up into her thorax. His wife's orgasm over, he sat up between her legs and pulled the knife back out, cutting downward slightly to open the skin and muscle slightly. Her legs were pinwheeling aimlessly as her body reacted to the pain, so he sat on her left leg to steady her body. Blood oozed slowly out of the wound, and out of Uwizera's right hand as she squeezed her daughter's heart. Kagame pushed the fingers of his left hand into the hole his his wife's midsection, and went to work on the outer layers of skin and muscle. Pulling the layers away, he pointed the blade upward and cut through them like the skin of a chicken, exposing a large loop of blue-pink intestine in yellow fat. He bent over and kissed her insides, then bent over again to kiss her breast, which was still dripping milk. He licked the milk, then licked her bleeding wound, drawing another sharp yelp from behind her gag. Kagame noticed that his wife was clutching their daughter's body tightly with her left hand, squeezing the girl's milk-filled stomach out of the gash below her ribs. He smiled at the beautiful sight, then turned back to his wife's own belly. Still lifting the skin and muscle away, he pushed the knife around the curve of her uterus, exposing the bright red organ to the hot, moist air. When he reached her protruding navel, he cut around it, then followed the dark, dark line of her linea negra all the way to the wild hairs of her pussy. The swollen organ pushed its way out of the mother's belly, pushing the stretched skin, fat, and muscle out of the way. There was no doubt now that the baby was kicking, as the surface of the uterus was rippling with pokes from arms, legs, and head. Setting the knife between her breasts, Kagame moved to Uwizera's side, and gently lifted her head to let her see. As she watched, pain and wonder mixed on her sweating face, Uwizera saw her own uterus contract around the baby, the powerful muscle working to expel the baby from its dying mother. When he laid her head gently back to the ground, Uwizera's legs stilled, and she pointed to her gag with her bloody hand. Kagame removed the cloth, and Uwizera took a deep breath. A sucking sound came from the hole in her diaphragm. "Let, me see, our baby," she wheezed. He looked around for something to prop her head on, and saw the little girl. Smiling as his resourcefulness, he lifted Uwizera's head again, moved her arm, and dragged his daughter's opened body under his wife's head. He laid the head back down, and Uwizera could see her insides, while lying on a bed of her first baby's insides. Kagame turned back to her abdomen. He cut across the top of the flaps of skin, following her ribcage, and across the bottom, following her pelvis. Now, her skin and muscle were inside out on the ground, just like her white dress, now soaking in her blood along with her daughter's. Her uterus stood alone in a pile of her intestines, which were now moving out her now-open sides. He lifted the uterus out of the pile, and with his knife, poked one of the pink-white ovaries near the top on the back. A shiver went through Uwizera's body as her system responded to the new attack, but endorphins and shock were preventing any further reaction. He pushed the knife through the ovary, and the point touched her uterus. But the muscle was very tough, and he couldn't hold the near full term baby and cut at that angle. So he laid the organ back down, and began sawing through the top. The tough fibers gave way, though he had to stop for a moment as the baby kicked his knife out of his hand. His wife's breathing was growing more ragged as her lungs lost capacity and her body lost blood, so as soon as he cut through the uterine wall, he pushed the tip of the knife into the hole. The bag of waters burst, spraying a thin stream of amniotic fluid straight across his wife's chest and into her face. She smiled, as much as she was able, tasting her own fluid as it dripped down her lips. To finish the cut, Kagame pushed two fingers into the small hole, and as before, turned the knife blade up to avoid cutting the baby. Reacting to the injury, her uterus contracted spasmodically, gushing fluid over her exposed stomach and making the hole in her diaphragm sputter. She began coughing weakly, and Kagame knew he didn't have much time. He sawed through a quarter of the way around the uterus, then a powerful contraction pushed his knife out of his hand as the baby's bottom came pouring out of the wound. Kagame pulled the baby out bottom first, and saw another smile on his wife's now ashen face. It was a little baby girl. Knowing her time was nearly over, Kagame turned the new baby around, and placed her on her mother's breast. Despite the difficult birth, the baby latched on lovingly, and milk began flowing for the last time. Uwizera looked from the baby to Kagame with love, as the last light began to fade from her eyes. The baby's umbilical cord, still attached to the placenta inside the uterus, was pulsing with the baby's rapid heartbeat. Kagame put the knife in Uwizera's hand, and together, they guided it into the new baby's heart. She twitched for a few seconds, as the cord connecting her with her mother slowed, and was still. As Uwizera looked at her new life, her new death, Kagame tore open the cut in her diaphragm with his hands. He grasped her slowly beating heart, and with a yell of orgasmic delight and unspeakable despair, he tore it loose and pulled it out. The fire died in Uwizera's eyes, and Kagame lay across his dead family, clutching the heart of the only woman he'd ever loved. When the Huutu mob came to his house that afternoon, he showed them the bodies, and the heart. It was a cold-eyed Kagame who left his home that night, machete in hand, one of a million Hutus and Tutsis driven to the edge of madness by the beauty of death. d udet