A/N: definately a different plot format for me -- no one died.
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See the faces. All the ugly, smushed faces. The shriveled, crabapple eyes. Cheeks as red and swollen as gas giants. Wide mouths, forever mouths. Wailing like widowed wives. Shrill alarm, contagious, echoing down the mum-faced halls. Look at em scrunch. Such ugly little polyps. They grow like tumors. They infest this hospital, plopped out, red and hairless. Lord, lookit their hands working, working. Groping and plying the air. The stiff, jointed movements, meaty appendages. Always puking, pissing, crapping, mewling. Wriggly as invertebrates. Gummy mouths, their blotchy bodies – all blue and red and pink and white. The doctor's spank still lingering on their footsoles, their mothers, fat and reptilian, with wide arms and juiced faces saying, my baby, my baby, let me see my baby!
Godssakes, I told em I'd go crazy. Plum, honestogod crazy if they put me in this ward and look at me. Look at me. I can't barely think straight anymore. I'm always smelling baby powder and I'm always hearing em. I go to sleep. There's a baby in my pillow. Can't get a good night's sleep no more. Always crying and crawling in my ear.
I wheel the newborns down the hallway from the labor rooms to the nursery. I've got three. They're packaged in their blankets and footies and blue pastel stockingcaps like delicate artifacts. Their squid-pink faces all twisted and resentful. There's a loose wheel on my cart. It squeaks all the way down the hall, and the babies cry, and I try my best not to go crazy. Bite my lip. Try not to look down at them ugly, old-man faces.
The doctors stand in the hall with their charts and their slick hair, hunched and white and dainty as moths. The hall opens up like a yawn. I descend. Doorways click past, gathered and humble. The nurses and visitors smile and me and the babies and oooh and aaah like they've never seen a pruney, naked baby before. Put me anywhere but maternity or psych, please God, I'd prayed. Please, please, please. I can't stand the crazies and the babies.
I don't pray no more.
I come to the nursery door and a doll-faced young doctor with neat fingernails opens the door for me and I squeak in. The babies squirm in their cribs. The place smells of formula and wails. Cribs lined up like crypts. They're all wearing the same pink footies and pastel blue stockingcaps and the same godawful expression. Linda, head nurse, looks at me with her watery, toady eyes and lets out a sigh.
“Good. You're here. I need a drag. Watch the kids for a coupla minutes, will you?”
She smiles at me – fatty, blubbery face lifting like a tide. Tight orange hair coiling under her cap. Fallen, shrunken face. Wiping the baby puke and the slobber on her skirt and waddling out, hubcap haunches bouncing and jugging. The sun stares in, poor and sick and drugged, like a wounded soldier. I wheel the babies down to the empty cribs, gritting my teeth. Stay collected, stay professional. I stop, close my eyes, smooth my skirt. Their filthy, trollish faces, leering, nodding like bee-heavy flowers. Sleep, children. Sleep. I open my eyes, smile. I pick one up. A boy, tagged, belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Henderson. Lidded, squinty eyes and mercifully silent. I deposit him into the lap of the crib. Wrap him up in his blanket and comforter like I do with all of em, as if they're sides of meat in a butcher's shop.
Pick the other bastard up. Wormy and segmented, mouth wide and wordless. Another boy, tagged, belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. Thin, combed cursive strokes of hair growing on his scalp, white and filamented. He gropes, pillages, dimpled fists, redskinned as a savage.
Huddled lamps, skirted and skinny-necked as bridesmaids shine above us. I can't help just holding the Lewis Baby up to the light for a little bit. Look at him. Fully examine this disgusting person-pupa. He looks the same. He looks exactly like every other godawful baby on the whole ward! Red, airless face. Troupes of toes, the eyes big and and bulging and shiny. And all the mothers and the fathers, queued up doppelgangers outside waiting for their handout, with their creeping fingers and their tired, goofy faces.
Baby after baby after baby.
I look down the row.
I see the same face repeated. The same pink-clothed bodies and stockingcapped heads.
The Lewis Boy is pissing.
I can smell it through his diaper.
“I could smush you like a bug,” I mutter to Lewis. “I'm God right now, boy. I'm your sun, moon, and stars. What if I put you outside, huh? Just for a minute. You'd be gobbled up before I could blink, you know? Fat, pink, hairless. Screaming your friggin head off. Wouldn't be a single animal who wouldn't want to taste your soft, fresh meat.”
I poke him in the stomach. He smiles, big and dopey, fingers crawling, meeting, squinching like caterpillars. I smile, too. That's right, that's right. I look down at the Henderson boy.
“You, too.”
And then I think, wouldn't it be a scream? An absolute riot? Henderson and Lewis. Shiny, puddled faces and arms outstretched for their baby, their baby. And they get the other couple's child? They all look the same, anyway. The same puggish, slab-bellied infants, slim and clicking like roaches. Lewis to Henderson. Henderson to Lewis. My baby, my baby.
I can barely contain myself.
Laughing, laughing.
“Boy oh boy. See what I mean? I can knock down your whole world. Change it in an minute!”
I switch the babies, the tags. They've stopped crying. They look up at me, wide-eyed and slug-cheeked. Erratic arm swings, the pedaling legs. I smile down at em. They look so beautiful. Faces clouded and spinning like nebulas.
I wrap em up.
Boy oh boy!
They coo and spit and I sing em a lullaby.
I mean, babies are just adorable.
