After nine agonizing hours of contractions, I’m hauled into the delivery room. My pubes get shaved with a rusty razor. An enema is forced in my anus. The doctor, a brusque woman with coarse canine features, declares that I’m unable to dilate. Bluish light reflects in the lines of her face, her silhouette stark against the tiled walls.
“Five centimeters,” she says, and wags her head. “You’re not trying hard enough.”
The baby’s head is ripping me. The pain is unbearable. Wet with sweat, feverish and frantic, I scream.
“What are you yelling for?” The doctor rounds on me. “Who asked you to get pregnant? It didn’t hurt screwing, did it? But now you cry like it hurts? Shut your mouth and push!” Her harsh face twists with resentment.
“What would you know about screwing?” I say. “When was the last time you got laid, you sadistic bitch? Who’d want to fuck you? You’re nothing but a yapping mutt—” Pain cuts me off.
“Push, dura, push!”
I grunt and pant and squeeze.
“Bad mother! You’ll suffocate the baby! Push!”
Two nurses throw themselves on my stomach and press down.
I can’t draw air.
“Give me the scalpel. I’m cutting her open.” The doctor leans in and hot fire splits my groin.
I holler in agony.
“I got the head! Push!”
I push and feel something huge slide out of me. My belly collapses on itself like a deflated balloon.
“It’s a boy!” the nurse says.
“Pavlik.” I can’t see through my tears. “Pavlik!”
I hear a cry, feeble at first. With each breath it grows stronger. Then I see him. A reddish squirmy baby boy held in gloved hands. The nurse ties a tag with a number to his foot and an identical one to my wrist.
“Give him to me.” My voice is hoarse from screaming.
The nurse wipes him, swaddles him, and carries him out.
“Where is she taking him? I want my baby! Give me my baby!”
My abdomen contracts and something else plops out. I’m so weak, I can barely move. The nurse cleans me roughly and begins stitching me up, sticking the needle right into my flesh.
And I lose it.
. . .
I wake up in a dark room. My head spins. My breasts ache, engorged with milk. There is no baby at my side. I throw off the blanket and shift my legs and stifle a cry. My crotch ripples with pain. I grip the headboard, struggle to standing, and listen.
Soft snores. Measured breathing. Bodies around me on beds. Gray light seeps in from the gap in the drapes and I glimpse a sliver of the sky hung with clouds.
“That’s where the golden city is,” I whisper, “above the clouds. The place where eagles live.”
I step into the slippers, creep to the door, and crack it open. The hinges screech. I freeze. Someone rolls over with a sigh. I wait until the bed springs settle and slip out, shuffling toward the babies’ cries. I can hear them coming from the corridor ahead. I pass by the nurses’ station where a nurse sleeps with her head on the desk, turn to the right, and come upon a line of square windows.
The nursery.
I press my face to the glass.
Weak light illuminates two rows of insect-like trolleys on casters. Atop each of them is a plastic tray with a newborn, about twenty total, swaddled head to toe, tags with numbers tied around their bottom ends. Most of them are asleep, a few are crying. Their tiny scrunched up faces gape with toothless holes.
YOU ARE READING
Irkadura
Fantasy"My mama became a catfish when I was two, on the day I stopped talking." Neglected since birth by her mother, Irina Myshko hasn't spoken a word for most of her short Soviet life. Outcast as a mute idiot and abused by her mother's boyfriends, she esc...
