A Guide to Being Born: Stories by Ramona Ausubel Read Free Book Online

the hormones could shrink her, not just stop her here. I wish she could get so she could fit in my hand. Or smaller.”
    “Like a doll.”
    “No chairs, no tubes. Just the two of us.”
    “The three of us?”
    “OK.”
    She sat up and her spine was a mountain range in her shirt.
    “That’s what happens when someone dies,” I said. “That’s when you get to have them everywhere.” She nodded, tipped her head to rest on one shoulder.
    “There’s a lot to look forward to,” she said, and began to lie down.
    “Wait,” I told her, “your hair is full of leaves.”
    I sat up and started to pull the dry brown pieces out one at a time. They fell apart in my fingers.
Dear Poppy,
We held hands and turned the pages of magazines. We said little. She’s going to do great and She’s so brave and I love you. I drank more coffee than I should have. It felt like something was about to change, but it wasn’t. That was the whole point. We were sending you in there so that nothing would ever change. Your brain has elected to stop where it is, and now your body will be eight years old until one day when you die. Will you get old? Will your hair turn lighter? Will your skin fall wrinkled over your little-girl body?
There was an old man in the waiting room with a cane and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that he’d probably had since 1950. He was reading the newspaper and I could see, even from across the room, the sprigs of hair growing out of his ears. I liked him for this. He seemed to be turning into earth, growing grass. I wondered who he was there for. No one joined him all morning and he did not fidget. At around 11:30 a nurse came out and told him, “Your wife did perfectly.” He carefully folded the paper up, smoothing it out, and said, “Of course she did.”
Another nurse came out holding a small dish with two bloody little beans on it. “These are the breast buds,” she told us, sounding bored. “As promised.” Before she could stop me, I picked one up and put it in my mouth. “Holy shit,” the nurse said, “what the fuck are you doing?” Roger was completely silent. He looked at me, huge eyed and flat faced. “Lady!” the nurse said. “You have to spit that out! That’s biohazard! That’s not something you can eat!”
I felt the thing in my mouth. It was perfectly smooth. It slipped over the skin of my cheek and my tongue. I could feel the threads of veins.
“Ma’am. Lady. You have to spit that out immediately.” She turned and looked around for someone who could help her. The desk was nurseless. No blue-scrubbed person in sight.
Roger put his hand on my back. “Maybe you should spit it out, Laura.”
“Too late. I swallowed it.”
“Holy shit!” the nurse says, “Jesus. Lady.”
But, Poppy, as the nurse was turning, spinning on her heels, looking for a kind of help she had never needed before, your father plucked the other bud out of the dish and held it in his hand. He looked at me and his lips spread out in a smile. The nurse looked into the glass dish smeared with a little pink blood. She shook her head and then suddenly she went quiet. She stopped her search and whispered to us, “You all are fucking nuts. Please don’t tell anyone this happened.” And off she went with her empty dish.
We ran outside holding hands. I spit the breast bud out into my palm.
“I thought you swallowed it,” he said.
I shook my head. “I had to lie so she’d let me go. Come on.” In the median I knelt down and began to dig a hole. Your father understood right away and helped, his left hand a protective fist, his right a shovel. In a few minutes, we had come to darker soil and we both put the seeds of you inside, covered them in earth. “To growing,” I said. “Whatever that might mean.” We sat down and held hands. We did not look at each other, but we squeezed our fingers tight together. Both of our cheeks were streaked from crying.
Inside, the doctors sewed the openings up with thread, your chest