Another Runner
A literary fiction vignette exploring the price you pay for freedom.
Another Runner
You’re in a paper thin hospital gown in some shade of green sitting in a waiting room with five other women and their IV’s. You’re all here for the same thing. A few look solemn, their posture closing in on themselves. Two have been here before. One is making it very clear. “This my sixth time back. I keep tellin’ my husband I’m gone end up right back here but he just won’t quit.” You hate that she’s Black. It makes you realize that you’re both statistics for a number of things. The woman she’s talking to is nodding like she has the exact same issue but she can’t seem to voice it so she just keeps nodding.
The room has no windows. If it wasn’t so unfinished and sterile it could maybe be a sauna or a spa the way that you’re all spaced out, sitting on benches, facing each other but avoiding eye contact, basically naked under the wisps of disposable gowns. You’re the youngest in the room. You wish you could escape. You wonder how many times a woman has stood up and silently exited, walked back down the hall as quickly as her no-slip socks would allow, grabbed her things from the locker they assigned her, changed in a hurry, pushed past everyone in the hall with her lips smashed together, her cheeks tightened in a polite smile, chin down. Would someone try to stop her or would they just refer to their clipboard and say her name three times in the waiting room, bored, before they crossed it off the list once they realized she was gone. Another runner, maybe they’d think.
#
You had decided that it was a girl and you had a name picked out and you could see her face and you loved her. You imagined that she had green eyes and light brown hair and ears that stuck out a little. She had long, lean legs and smooth, tanned skin. You romanticized what life with her would be like. You would be a happy family, the three of you. You’d go to parks and you’d eat ice cream in the sun and she’d be athletic and love to run and there would be so much laughter and she would always be smiling.
One morning you woke up and the first thought you had was that you couldn’t do this. You suddenly knew that the life you were envisioning was not a possibility. It could not be provided. You wanted to be a great mother and you knew that you had the capacity to be but that at that moment in time it would not have been possible. It was suddenly crystal clear.
Neither of you had the money to pay for the procedure, but you did some research and found a way to get it covered. Then you found a way to fit it into your schedules to keep things discreet. You had a feeling that he wouldn’t have taken the initiative, he wouldn’t have taken care of this because somehow this was your responsibility, even though he was older and supposedly much wiser, a message he subconsciously relayed to you daily. He spoke to you as if he had all the answers but really, he was in the passenger seat, he was along for the ride in no major way that you could tell but he fooled everyone around him with his boisterous voice and presence. Life would be very different if you relinquished full control to the old wise man.
#
He drove you here and you wish you knew what it was like for him to be waiting. Did it even register what was happening? Or did he only see what he wanted to see? They call your name and a chill runs through you and you and your IV follow the nurse into the room where it will happen. You climb onto the table and everyone is smiling. The smiles are meant to comfort, to show understanding and support. Their voices are gentle but they don’t put you at ease like they intend. It puts you on the verge. It is awful. And then the doctor’s face is upside down above you as he tells you to count to ten and the mask is over your face and the nurses are still smiling sadly.
When you wake up your womb feels empty. You have never felt this part of your body before and your introduction to it is feeling a sense of absence. There is something missing. A part of you is missing. A part of you has been removed and you chose for it to be removed and you can’t ever get it back. And you’re meant to be happy, to be relieved. The emptiness is meant to be equated with freedom. The emptiness will be something that you will try to fill with things that will never make you feel free.
Thank you for reading… Starting something called Lit Fic Friday where I’ll be posting some literary fiction that I’ve written (or am loving currently). I hope you enjoy it ♥️
On the Mars cazimi no less!?!? More please!