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Comentario
She sits in the corner, trying to draw air out of a room which seemed to have plenty just a few
minutes ago and now seems to have none. From what sounds like a great distance she can
hear a thin
whoop-whoop
sound, and she knows this is air going down her throat and then
sliding back out again in a series of feverish little gasps, but that doesn't change the feeling
that she's drowning here in the corner of her living room, looking at the shredded remains of
the paperback novel she was reading when her husband came home.
Not that she cares much. The pain is too great for her to worry about such minor matters as
respiration, or how there seems to be no air in the air she is breathing. The pain has
swallowed her as the whale reputedly swallowed Jonah, that holy draft-dodger. It throbs like
a poison sun glowing deep down in the middle of her, in a place where until tonight there was
only the quiet sense of a new thing growing.
There has never been any pain like this pain, not that she can remember — not even when
she was thirteen and swerved her bike to avoid a pothole and wiped out, bouncing her head
off the asphalt and opening up a cut that turned out to be exactly eleven stitches long. What
she remembered about that was a silvery jolt of pain followed by starry dark surprise which
had actually been a brief faint . . . but that pain had not been this agony. This terrible agony.
Her hand on her belly registers flesh that is no longer like flesh at all; it is as if she has been
unzipped and her living baby replaced with a hot rock.
Oh God please,
she thinks.
Please let the baby be okay.
But now, as her breath finally begins to ease a little, she realizes that the baby is
not
okay,
that he has made sure of that much, anyway. When you're four months pregnant the baby is
still more a part of you than of itself, and when you're sitting in a corner with your hair stuck
in strings to your sweaty cheeks and it feels as if you've swallowed a hot stone—
Something is putting sinister, slippery little kisses against the insides of her thighs.
'No,'
she whispers,
'no.
Oh my dear sweet God,
no.
Good God, sweet God, dear God,
no.'
Let it be sweat,
she thinks.
Let it be sweat
. . . or
maybe I peed myself. Yes, that's probably
it. It hurt so bad after he hit me the third time that I peed myself and didn't even know it.
That's it
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