The Miracle of Birth

    Sunlight floods the room.  Some careless nurse, by accident or design, has left the windows open on this hot summer day, giving entrance to warm light and comforting ambience.

    It doesn't belong.  Not in the hospital. It is full of dead men, my friends have told me, full of vengeful specters, doomed to trot its slippery marble floors for eternity.  They are everywhere, my friends say, but when I look around, there is only me.  My scruffy, grimy face, reflected in the white, sun-warmed marble, jeers at me, with distorted features, as if taunting me for my ineptitude. Reprimanding me, filling the room with an ominous fear.  I am terrified of what is to come.

    I am about to be an older sibling.

    Mother has been swelling of late.  First she was a grapefruit, all round, and soft, but as time progressed she became a watermelon, foreign, ovoid, and unwelcoming. That was the first slight my younger brother inflicted upon me; for nine months he made it impossible for my mother to embrace me.  He has invaded my life, growing like a listless fetal parasite, with its rending claws stuck fast to my mother's womb.  She waddles now, because of him.  She is like a human penguin, more suited to the Arctic than  the clinical, peroxide-laden halls of the Summer View Hospital Maternity Ward.  Nonetheless she endures.  For his sake, she endures.

    They will love him more; I know this in my veins.  They will love him and forget all about me, forget all about their soon-to-be eldest son. My younger brother will rip his way out of my mother's stomach, and take the place that I so coveted.  Already, I hate him.

 
    I am unable to see his triumphant arrival.  For one as young as I, the way is shut by the two vast double-doors that separate the waiting room from  its surgical counterpart . They mock me with their cleanliness, their brightness, their utter impregnability. The insatiable curiosity present within all children consumes me; I want to see. When, as my friends have told me, my new sibling claws his way out of a gaping hole in my mother's stomach, I want to be able to see it.

    I crawl to the surgery door, and push.  When there is no result, I pull.  Still, nothing.  With frustration, I hurl myself against it, only to be repulsed by polished steel, and sturdy wood.  It is laughing at me, this door.  I push, and I pull, and I scream and yell, and all it does is laugh.  With the last of my reserves, I prepare for a frontal assault, ready to strike the hated door into the abyss.

    A nurse spies my plight.  Swooping down, she mothers me away from the jeering door, tells me, in the strict, matronly tone possessed by all nurses,  that I am not to go in, but stay in the playroom.

   I am no fool.  What else can I do?  I obey.


    Countless hours pass, countless listless, droll hours.  The nursery in the waiting room simply cannot occupy my attention.  After exhausting my secret supplies of chocolate, spilt handily across the front of my denim overalls, and playing repetitive racing games with assorted toy cars, I find myself with nothing to do but contemplate my brother's coming. With each passing thought, I grow more and more afraid.  Afraid of replacement, of the loss of my position.  Tentatively, though I am not a religious boy, I whisper are short, heartfelt in treaty to the heavens.  If only, I plead, If only they could make him disappear--!

    The surgery door opens. Harsh, sterile light washes across me, burns my eyes, and sets shadows fluttering across the nursery room. They titter and chuckle, as they drip tenebrously from the sickeningly sweet wallpaper. He is coming, they whisper. You will be usurped.

     Two figures emerge from the blinding light; the doctor, and his nurse.  He walks a doctor's walk, clipped and precise, each shoe making a satisfying click! against the smooth marble floor. As for the nurse, she mimics him,  since that is what nurses are supposed to do.

    I look at the pair with plaintive eyes, begging for answers.  The doctor says nothing; he is a monolith of flesh, immobile, as if he had been hewn from marble. The nurse, being slightly less monolithic, finds enough time to give me a sort of sad, flitting smile. I know that smile.  She is telling me that she is sorry for my brother's birth, sorry for her part in it. Sorry, for condemning me to neglect, and dust, and ashes. She is smiling the wincing grimace of regret.

    My father strides out. I expect them to be holding my brother, raising him into the sky, like some primitive Jungle God, but he walks out alone. his shoulders are hunched, weary, with the weight of what seems like a thousand years. He kneels, and looks me in the eye.

    Now he will say it I think to myself. Now he will apologize to me, and say that there is no room, that he is sending me away.  My brother, he will say, takes precedence over myself.

    But he does not say any of these things.  Instead he talks, shortly and succinctly.  I am too young, many of his words are far too advanced for me to comprehend, but in the end, I manage to glean a general idea; The baby is dead.

    And then, the nurse begins to cry, because, poor thing, it was her first birthing, and she had been so very excited, and the doctor and my father simply stand stone-still, as if there is some silent exchange of manly consolation in between them. My mother sleeps, having slipped into unconsciousness shortly after the miscarriage, and my brother lives in some cold receptacle, filthy and rotting, steeped in his own lifeless bodily juices.

    I cry, because I am supposed to cry.  I ask innocent questions, like "where did he go?", and "why?". I play the part of the bewildered, painfully young elder sibling, deprived of his chance at companionship.

    But secretly, in my darkest, hidden heart, I know that God has answered my prayers.  Deep within myself, I know exactly how I feel.

    I am happy.  And I loathe myself for it.