One Cup Removed From... Hogwash?

There is a particular sort of gas station where I live, open twenty-four hours, and set at strategic points around the county; they are rinky-dink little things, somewhere between the spare shacks of the South and the sparkly food palaces of the North. We make use of their coffee pots on a regular basis. I feel that my extended acquaintance with their services entitles me to state my opinion -- their coffee tastes like fried crud.

Yes, I settled this fact quite some time ago, and yes, I'm still drinking their coffee. Why? Because when I am out day and night, dispossessed of sleep and decent food, even fried crud appeals to me, so long as it's hot.

Fundamentally Uneducated

"If you have read through the four gospels - and I would not venture to say we all have..."

It is rather sad, is it not, that among the people of the church such a pulpit observation should be substantiated? While it is hardly a point of condemnation, one does expect a certain amount of Biblical familiarity from lifelong church members, and failure to find it is a depressing reflection of our Sunday religion, shallow living, distracted souls...

Now let the writer take heed to her own words and pick up her Bible, as she cannot recall when she last (if ever) read completely through any given book of the four gospels.

How to Drive Your Wife to Homicide in Six Simple Steps

1. Watch telly for the duration of her labour, and expect her to look up for all the interesting parts. Ramble about inane topics through her contractions; only pay attention to her when she begs you to hold her hand as the baby is crowning, then return to your television program as she catches your son to her chest and cries in relief.

 

2. Cook fabulous dinners and leave the dishes strewn haphazardly across the counters, to be cleaned the next day, the next week, the next year.

 

3. Gut a room in the house, stash it with tools, and proceed to forget about it for six months. Brownie points if it's a room she uses on a regular basis, like the bathroom or the master bedroom.

 

4. When naming aforementioned baby, ridicule her favourite names, then spend hours presenting absurdly-pronounced and random words from exotic languages.

 

5. Two days after she gives birth order her to lie down and take a nap, then leave her with the baby, a traumatized toddler, and three older children competing to rival the Energizer Bunny. Go out to your personal shed and fiddle for two hours with your hobbies. When you come back inside give her a tongue lashing for not sleeping and yell at the kids for playing. Better yet, make them cower -- make them all cower -- because you're just that scary.

 

6. See to it that she knows how grateful she should be for having such a helpful and devoted husband. In case anyone asks, have ready a spiel on how your family victimizes you.

~ ~ ~

Results are guaranteed; side effects for your wife include mental breakdown, imprisonment, committment to an asylum, habitual use of opiates, and suicide. All this, of course, after she has cannibalized your children and strung you up in the rafters by a nursing bra. You haven't a speck of my sympathy... but I pity the children their fate.

 

Poor little kiddos.

Unnameable

We'd been waiting a week for the call; when it came, Ike's urgency put speed to our wheels. Even careening from lane to lane (I hate it when my employer drives), tearing through the countryside in dead night, we missed the birth by twenty minutes. When I entered the bedroom I looked for the baby.

Sadie had climbed back into her bed, burrowing deep beneath her dim-toned quilt. The bowl of afterbirth sat on the rug beside the bed, variegated shades of red contrasted sharply against the white enamel of the container, and there was the baby, dangling backwards from the rim of the bowl into the folds of a towel. The body, hideously deformed, hung limp.

Translucent skin peeled from the baby's frame. Fluid filling her head forced the facial skin downward towards the neck, grossly distorting her features and turning her head into a bloated mass. Not since the birth of Rachel's twins had I been so hard pressed by revulsion. The baby had decayed almost beyond recognition.

I knelt down and cradled the baby in the towel, focusing on the more intact parts - the tiny, perfect hands, the beautiful feet. "Your baby, Sadie. Have you been able to take a good look at your baby?" The words helped reestablish equilibrium, pushing me past cringing at the malformation and deterioration. I suggested making footprints and hand prints for Ike and Sadie.

The decayed feet came out as jumbled marks, as did one of the hands. I took the ink pad from my employer, reached for the other hand, and made the final hand print a perfect one.

We did a rudimentary exam, similar to the one done for a term infant. She weighed ten ounces, measured at eleven inches long. She was classed as a twenty-eight week fetal demise.

What trivial numbers.

They wrapped the baby in a sheet which I had the privilege of cutting to pieces. The metal shears chilled my hand; the sound of rent fabric grated against my ears. Taking up the baby box, a rudimentary coffin made from an antique cigar box, Sadie looked at her lost child. When she turned back to us her eyes were dry.

As per tradition they chose not to name the baby, being unsure if she had possessed a soul; I wrote "stillborn daughter" on the footprint card where the name would have gone. Sadie rose from her bed and went to the bathroom, and when she came out she was smiling. "I feel fine now."

 

The birth was over, and we could offer no more service that night. Packing up our bags, we excused ourselves quietly and left. They tucked the baby's body away in the laundry room for safekeeping and preservation until morning, when she would be properly buried... in yet another nameless grave.