Induced

“A baby ain’t a shit, Catherine.”

Annabeth was all wrinkled skin from too many hours in a tanning bed. She didn’t believe in cancer. The cigarette bouncing up and down between her lips was a testament to that fact.

“They can’t just give you some uterus-enema because they want to. Tell ‘em no. Tell ’em you want to do it natural. Healthier that way.”

“I find that ironic, coming from you.” I leaned back in my seat, foot pressed to the brake. “This thing’s a week late. I want it out.”

She snorted at me. “It’ll come when it wants to come. Got plenty of time in the big cold world.”

I rolled the windows down and she yelped as the winter crept in. Glaring at me, she popped the lock and said, “Alright, alright, yeah, I get it.”

“Can’t risk that second hand stuff on the baby, you know!” I replied. “It’s not natural!”

I didn’t catch her reply, but it certainly had ‘bitch’ in it somewhere. She hunched against the chill as I watched her walk up towards her apartment, frizzy white hair popping out of her head like mold on a raisin. Quite the character was Annabeth, an odd combination of hypocrisy and knee-jerk truths she pulled from old magazines. She wore the kind of loud clothing that made a great first example for teaching kids not to stare.

I eased back onto the street. It was one of those forgotten roads, the backwoods of the city. My tires popped and thumped over the potholes I didn’t bother to steer around. I sang to the beat, tapping my fingers to the steering wheel.

“C’mon baaaaaaay!” Bounce, jerk. “C’mon out, baaaaaby!”

The thought of why I wanted rid of the thing inside of me reared its ugly head. I blasted the radio, some rapper blathering nonsensically. I didn’t change the channel. I let it wash over me and tried to drive the thoughts out with the words.

Didn’t work. I could hear his voice as if he were right there, in the passenger’s seat, clicking the buckle in. Hear it as if I was still hiding in the closet, terrified, his footsteps in the hall. ‘Come out baby,’ he used to say. I never understood how he could sound so sweet and soothing. ‘You come on out now.’

He always found me. Bounced me off the floor. Jerked me up and pressed me against the wall. I raised a shaking hand off the wheel and brushed it over my throat. The bruises were gone. Long gone. But he’d left something there, past muscle and sinew straight to the core of me. He’d left fingerprints on my soul, and only God could dust for that crime.

I don’t believe in God.

I pressed on the accelerator. At the halfway house where I met Annabeth, some ninny with a bible told me it wasn’t right to get rid of the thing growing inside of me. I sneered at her. Not because I disagreed but because of the label she put on it. I didn’t have to answer to a higher calling that had never answered me. No, I kept it because there’d been enough pain, enough suffering. I’d thought maybe, just maybe, something good might come out of it. I’d find it a loving home, the sort of thing I’d never had. I wouldn’t care to visit, wouldn’t even care of the parents told it I’d been some kind of lunatic crack whore. I’d know the truth: out of all that suffering, there’d been life.

Maybe then I’d feel alive again.

I pulled out of the neighborhood. Houses flashed by. Some needed repairs. Most a match and lighter fluid. I still had one hand over my stomach, as if I could just will the thing to give way. To go away. I was ready for this part of my life to be over. It was time to move on, and this was my way to just let it all go.

I was on my porch when I saw it. The light flicked on and I looked down at the cement. Red trickled out steadily, smattering over the yellow like blood on flesh. I don’t know why I didn’t feel it until that moment. It was warm and wet, coated my thighs, stuck my jeans to me. I could come up with nothing more eloquent than ‘oh,’ and then my world spun, and then it was dark.

I woke up to white lights and sterility. I woke up and felt a hollowness in me. My hands roved down, felt the stitching over my womb. I could hear people bustling out in the hallway, flashing by my door, some family members carrying balloons and teddy bears for loved ones. I guess I could have paged for someone. The thought crossed my mind, but it felt dreamlike really. Unreal. I knew it was real though, and somehow I knew something else too.

When the nurse came in it was written on her face. The sort of face that could make a killing at poker. I don’t know why, but the words came easy to me.

“Dead?”

She blinked, poker face dying, getting pale. “I’m so sor-”

“So, what merchandise did it have?”

She stared at me wide-eyed, like a doe about to be run down by a truck. It was funny somehow and I felt a giggle start to bubble up. “Boy or girl?”

“It…it was a boy…”

“What happened to it?”

She shifted back and forth uncomfortably. “The…the umbilical cord…”

“Wrapped around his neck?” I finished, impatient. The giggling got louder. “He fucking hung himself, that what you’re telling me?”

The nurse flinched, fingers fidgeting for the little walkie-talkie on her belt. Annabeth’s words came flooding back to me, ‘Got plenty of time in the big cold world.’ I thought of his hands on me, holding me against the coffee table, using my skull to beat through the glass. I couldn’t help it. I laughed, I laughed and laughed and laughed as that nurse backed out the door. Tears began to stream down my face and I looked up at the ceiling.

“You lucky bastard,” I whispered. “You lucky, lucky little bastard.”

And then I went on not being alive.