My Aborted Child
I met Michael the summer after seventh grade. I know, I was pretty young, wasn’t I? So young that I didn’t know any better. I was easy to manipulate, and he knew that. My best friend Lily introduced me to him. Apparently, he was her cousin’s best friend. I don’t think she meant any harm by it. I’m sure that if she had known what he was planning to do to me, she never would have introduced us.
Back then, I swore I was in love with him. Looking back now, I know I never was. I was naïve, and stupid. What I felt for him wasn’t love. It was infatuation, lust. Never love. I thought he actually cared about me. I thought he would protect me against anything and everything. I was wrong, and I had to learn that the hard way.
I never let my parents know about him. He was seventeen and I was only thirteen. Pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it? My parents were always strict about boys anyway. Hell, they were strict about everything, but boys always had been the worst subject. I wasn’t even allowed to talk to boys on the phone, much less go out with them.
I remember that night perfectly. The night he stole away my innocence, the night he raped me. I remember every little detail. I wasn't ready to have sex with him yet. I told him to stop. I begged and screamed, but he didn’t listen to me. It was like he wasn’t even there anymore. It was like he was in his own little world.
I didn’t recognize this part of him. I’d never seen him like that before. He wasn’t the Michael I knew anymore. He was a monster-a big, scary, out of control monster that I didn’t stand a chance of protecting myself against. He was too strong to fight off. Trust me, I tried. I used every drop of strength I had to try to defend myself, but all it did was make me weaker.
After he was finished with me, he dropped me in some gutter and left me there like I was some piece of trash. I felt dirty, and ashamed. I knew it wasn’t my fault that he did what he did to me. I never blamed myself for it, but I couldn’t help but wish that I had never messed with him. I should’ve done what my parents had wanted and stayed away from boys until I was seventeen, but I didn’t, and I paid the price for it.
Needless to say, when my father found out what Michael had done to me, he was mad. No, he was furious. I don’t even know if that is strong enough of a word to describe what he was. In a blind rage, my father grabbed his state-issued gun and went out to find to find the idiot that was stupid enough to hurt his little girl.
My dad found Michael on his second day of searching. I’m still not sure how my dad managed to track Michael down. He’d never heard of him before. He didn’t even know what he looked like. I guess nothing can stand in the way of an enraged father. Anyway, as soon as my dad found Michal he shot him right between the eyes. The trial didn’t take long. Apparently, the judge had two or three daughters of his own. I guess he took pity on my dad. Maybe he felt like he would’ve done the same thing in my dad’s shoes. He gave my dad the minimum sentence. Twelve years in prison with no chance of parole until the eighth year.
About a week or two after I was raped, I decided to take a pregnancy test, just to be safe. It came back positive. As you can probably imagine, I was terrified. I was only thirteen. I didn’t know how to take care of a baby. I had my whole life ahead of me. I had a bright and shining future to look forward to. I didn’t want some unwanted baby to come in and ruin that. Besides, I knew I wouldn’t have been a good mother to that child. That baby wasn’t conceived out of love. It was conceived by a cruel and hateful act, and I knew I would never be able to look at it without hating it. I knew I couldn’t love it like a mother should love her child.
Against my mother’s wishes, I decided to get an abortion. She tried to tell me that I would pay for it later, but I didn’t listen. By getting an abortion, I was doing both me and the baby a favor. My mother didn’t think so, but her opinion didn’t matter to me. She didn’t understand what I was going through. I was the one who was thirteen and pregnant, not her. She just didn’t understand. Besides, the kid wouldn’t know the difference anyway. I mean, it wasn’t even born yet. What’s wrong with stopping something before it even has a chance to get started?
Twelve years after the abortion, I got married. Two years after that, I was on my way to the hospital to give birth to my baby boy. He was born shortly after we reached the hospital. Later that night, I was alone in my hospital room with my son, who we decided to name Eliot. My husband was downstairs getting some food from the cafeteria, and all our visiting family members had long since left to give us some well needed rest.
I was lying there, not quite believing the miracle that I was holding. I watched Eliot sleep peacefully, his chest rising and falling to a steady rhythm. He looked so innocent with his little hand wrapped around my finger, so ignorant of the cruel world outside his mother’s arms.
For the first time in almost a decade, I found my thoughts drifting to the child I had aborted so long ago. It was strange to think that it would have been doing the same thing Eliot was doing, had I decided to let it be born. It would have slept in my arms just like Eliot, it's hand would have clutched my finger just like Eliot’s. It would have grown up to be a person just like Eliot. The only difference between Eliot and the aborted child was that Eliot was alive, and the aborted child was not.
Was it so bad, that none of that made me feel any remorse? Was it wrong that I still felt nothing about my decision to deny a child the right to live? It was a chance that I gave to Eliot eagerly, but one that I stole away from it. All of this made me feel like I should have felt awful, but it didn't. I refused to let myself feel guilty over a decision that I made so long ago. I forced myself to stop brooding over the past and to only look forward to the bright future ahead, just like I had so many years ago.
The next morning, we were driving home after being released from the hospital. It was raining so hard that my husband could hardly see the road. All of a sudden, a huge pick-up truck (at least it seemed huge to a terrified family in a tiny little sports car) came out of nowhere and hit us head on.
My husband and I spent the next few weeks in intensive care. We were pretty beaten up, but we eventually came out okay. Eliot wasn't so lucky. The impact was too much for his little body to take.
When they told me my baby was dead, I couldn't take it. It felt like my whole world was crashing down around me. I started to waste away right before my own eyes. My husband and family did everything they could to try to make it better.They would say things like "It wasn't our fault Cathrine." or "There was no way we could've avoided it."
None of it helped. I didn't listen. For the next few weeks I ate just enough to keep me alive, but only because my husband forced me to. Every thing I did hurt. It hurt to eat, it hurt to drink, it hurt to breathe; It hurt to live. It wasn't until I was over the shock that I realized something. I was finally paying the price for my aborted child.
First of all, congrats on the featured work! Realistic works like this deserve to get featured! 
But, in general, the idea and the concept is great. 
