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.