They’ve left me alone here, staring down at those closed eyes, the glimmer of your skin already a cold so white my eyes sting. Did you even realize you were alive in my arms before it was over? Did you get to see my face before you closed your eyes?
Mother couldn’t stand to look at me when they swaddled me in clothes and peeled me from the bed. Her face was the sheer grey of a blood steeped cliff, her eyes empty with the hatred that had grown inside her.
“It’s better off this way,” she’d pronounced when I wobbled into the hall, my eyes nearly swollen shut. The ache inside me had screamed, beating little fists against the soft underbelly of my heart.
Do you know that when the sharp side of her palm hit my cheek, the stars I saw were the ones that had died in your eyes?
Your face is so peaceful I can’t bear to look at it; it burns in the rage bubbling up my throat until I shove the blanket over your face, feeling my throat clench and twist, trying to spit out a scream.
The baby next to you starts to cry, the peachy fuzz of his hair bouncing up and down. Mother is outside the window, watching us, the hard line of her mouth a pallid darkness, drenched in her customary red lipstick.
You’ll be late for work, she mouths, unmoving, jaw bobbing with her irritation. As if this were another normal day. As if I hadn’t just morphed from two to one person. As if my child wasn’t lying in front of my face, dead.
The peach hair baby’s cries are ricocheting now, striking walls and windows and the soft inside of my ears, worming their way through my skin and setting fire to everything everywhere. Mother’s eyes lock on mine, nearly red with her anger, and her hands flap wildly as if they could extract me from the past nine months.
The baby’s cries are coarser now, and his tiny lips are working against my palm, trying to push me off. It’s so easy to disappear, isn’t it? For nine months you were me and I was you and now you’re gone, and yet for some strange reason I’m still surrounded by gurgling babies.
My hands are tightening around his head, choking the gurgle of cries slipping out of his little mouth. It would be so easy- so, so easy- to just push and end this, take away what the universe took from me.
Mother raps the glass with her fist. For the first time I look down, and the image of my hands against that peachy fuzz is so morbidly right that I stumble backwards onto the floor.
The peach tufts tremble again as the baby begins to scream even harder, causing nurses to rush in along with Mother, who yanks at my elbow, and even as she pulls me away the tears continue to drip off my face.
How will you ever know I love you?
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