Eight Ways to Keep the Body of a Child
By Scott Provence
One
All at once the doctors burst into the room. They move with a vaudevillian inevitability, the squat, gray-haired one falling comfortably between the expectant mother’s legs. “The mathematicians have arrived,” he gestures grandly, “to mediate this process of multiplication and division.” His hair pokes up over the white tips of the sheet.
The second doctor clears his throat. It is hard to hear over the mother’s stretching and screaming. “Very soon,” he explains, “we will be able to officially pronounce this baby as dying.” The anesthesiologist, who has come to administer the epidural, runs out of the room to compose a poem on the matter.
“We’ve got a problem here,” the first doctor says, raising a bloodied glove in the air like a conductor. “The baby seems to be coming out of the womb.”
©2007 Scott Provence. All rights reserved.
