Free A Guide to Being Born: Stories by Ramona Ausubel

air breather the same way she was, but it must also like to be wet. She went to the window and opened it, put her hands out in a cup and waited while the air blew cold across her skin. Drops fell but dripped through her fingers and she couldn’t collect much. She returned to the flopping baby and rubbed her water-hands onto its face and then its back, which someone had tried to cover with a nightgown, a thing that seemed ridiculous to Hazel.
    She remembered the mop bucket and slid her way to it. It was hard to bend down, but she was able to drag it to the crib using the mop as a handle. She pulled the mop up and water streamed down, splashing her feet and the floor. She ran the gray tendrils over the baby, smelling the soap and dirt in the water. It started to cry again. She made shushing sounds in her mouth and tried to hum “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The mop went back and forth, the baby cried, Hazel hummed. She took a deep breath and leaned down to grab the bucket. Sharp shots crossed back and forth in her stomach. She winced and squeezed her eyes shut but kept bending. She caught hold of the handle and lifted. It wasn’t as heavy as she had expected, and coming up was easier than going down.
    Hazel started to sing the words of the song as she raised the mop bucket over the crib and poured. The water was cold and gray in the dark room. It ran out in ropes, twisting together and splashing into the crib, where the baby cried and threw her small weight back and forth. The blankets soaked through. The thin mattress soaked through. The sleeves of Hazel’s nightgown were wet and dripping. The baby’s cough was so small it didn’t even make it to the walls to bounce.
    “Is that enough?” she asked.
    No sound came after that, except a dripping
plip plip plip
on the floor. The baby was quiet and Hazel was quiet. The rain continued to be rain, the bed continued to be flat and rumpled. Nurses in other rooms still tried to move soundlessly while they adjusted feeding tubes and emptied bedpans. Hazel’s mother was still her mother. Hazel was still not her father and neither was her baby. The two of them would be fatherless together. They would be young together. “Now that I am a mother,” Hazel said to the baby, “I get to set the rules. And the rules are: swimming, sunning, playing. Everything else, we ignore.” She put the bucket down, empty now, and leaned into the crib to pick up the baby, blanket-wrapped and dripping.
    The bundle coughed one beautiful polished river rock of a cough. Hazel put her ear right down against the lips and heard air, in and out. The eyes looked up at her, surprised and afraid. Hazel breathed her air into her baby’s mouth and then waited until the baby breathed out so she could inhale that sweetness.
    Hazel walked with it around the room, careful and slow. The body was cool against her. Her clothes stuck to her breasts. She sat down at the edge of her bed. She put the baby down and removed her hospital gown, and then decided to remove the baby’s clothes too so their skin could touch. She held the baby to her chest, guided a nipple into the little mouth. Hazel had become aware of the baby’s arms and legs, but still saw the seal face, the slick black eyes. She could feel the whiskers brushing against her while it sucked, toothless and quiet.

Chest of Drawers
     
    BEN FELT EMPTY, in the literal sense. He poked at his belly button, at the organs beneath, which were producing no new miracles. As he understood it, his liver was filtering; his gall bladder was storing bile the liver produced during the filtration process; his intestine was connecting the in and the out; and in between, things got broken down with acids. None of that was new. He was the very same machine he had always been.
    He followed along with the Miracle of Life by reading books, day-by-day updates of exactly what the spine was doing, what mucus was gathering where. The sacks of air and fluid and the creation of the