When the shoulders passed, the pain passed as well, washed out, expelled with the baby. Mary unclenched the mattress, fell back onto the moist pillow and the clammy sheets. By its sudden absence, she was aware of the chaos both within her and without. And of the silence. She searched the silence for evidence of her baby; she searched the silence for her baby’s cry.
“John,” she tentatively uttered. “John, where is the baby? Is the baby… what happened to the baby…?”
“Baby’s fine,” John dismissed his wife. “They are only pulling the silver spoon out of the bugger’s mouth. Spent nine months living off his mother and now wants to spend the rest of his life living off me.”
Craning her neck, Mary noticed the blue hue of her new baby. “John, he’s blue.”
“Blue blood. That’s all.”
After a pause, without reflection, after the nurses stuck their bulb syringes into his mouth and up his nose and sucked from him fluid and mucus, the boy summoned the air in his lung and burst into the world.
