Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 1

Buy Night, Forgotten as a print book now! https://w.tt/3erxeIT

***

Authors LOVE feedback, so you're encouraged to leave comments as you read. Be sure to click the voting star on each chapter, too.
Note: Comments from others may contain spoilers, so read them at your own risk. Enjoy!
***

I watch my body giving birth from the outside.

The doctor's practiced hands reach into the cavern of my torso, which is pinned open like a science project.

There's Owen, sitting on a low stool next to my head. He stares at my closed eyelids. With his wavy blond hair trapped under a bulky blue hospital cap and sweat soaking into the neckline of his hastily donned scrubs, Owen looks like a character in a soap opera. Paler, though. In fact, he's much paler than usual. His jaw is visibly tense.

I want to hold his face in my hands and thank him for still being awake beside me, after everything that's happened.

But my hands won't move.

A blue curtain hangs perpendicular to the horror show of my open abdomen. It's meant to shield Owen's eyes, mercifully, from this new angle of my senseless body in case he looks down at it. He doesn't.

But from above, I see everything.

As I wait for a scream to emerge from this slimy, squirmy person—who didn't exist before but very much does now—I realize I want to scream, too.

Wake me up! Put my body back together!

They must have given me the good drugs because despite my best efforts, nothing happens. No one in the room reacts to me.

And there are a lot of people in the room. Besides Owen on the stool and the doctor, whom I don't recognize, four or five young-looking people in scrubs—students, maybe?—gather in the corner near the door. One in particular looks like he wishes he hadn't decided to peek behind the blue curtain. Several technicians and assistants rush around to deliver tools or directions, type furiously at computers on rolling desks, and yank ream after ream of paper from humming monitors.

Two nurses with pinched foreheads lean forward to assist the doctor, who holds the baby suspended above my open body.

The silence in the operating room seems to strangle time in its grasp. It's as if everyone has pooled our breath for the sake of the new life among us, all of us inhaling and holding... holding... until we can be sure the baby has gotten the air it needs.

Finally, a panicked wail escapes from its impossibly tiny body. The doctor hands the baby to one of the waiting nurses to be cleaned and measured. Owen's head snaps up, his gaze darting from my face to that of my son.

As Owen watches the baby and I watch him, I finally recognize the emotion in his eyes.

Anger.