12.20.2020

The nurse ran the instrument across my wife's abdomen. Back and forth we listened to the crackly whooshing electronic sound. It sounded like a cold wind across empty pampas. There wasn't any heartbeat. There was only the wind. 

The nurse of greater importance arrived and looked inside my wife and quickly turned away. She looked towards the wall and did not say anything. She stood and did not look at us and told the nurse standing at the door to bring another doctor. 

It was a tiny pink-red corpse. The skin was translucent. I did not look at it long. The nurse wrapped it up and put a little white hat on it and a little teddy bear on its chest. It had never breathed my air or seen me. I was not yet its father. The prematurely dead do not have fathers. It was mine I knew but it was not where it was supposed to be. What the nurses had done to it by dressing it up was obscene. It was not supposed to be mine until May of next year and here it was dead in November. We came to the hospital as three and left as two.

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