Push

"Mommy! Look at the fort I made!"

Trisha stubbed her cigarette out onto the concrete patio. A tiny four-year old girl appeared at her right knee. Her plaited pigtails ended in small green bows that Trisha herself tied.

"Yeah, honey. That's good."

Every time she looked into the little girl's light blue eyes, she felt a pang of guilt for her thrashing, unquellable rage on the hospital bed when the doctor said, incredulous:

"These are contractions and you, Trisha, are pregnant. You're going to have to push."

She didn't have rosy, glowing memories of pregnancy. In the nine months of the baby's gestation, Trisha had been intimate with two men and one woman, and tried cocaine for the first time. When the contractions began, she was cursing her choice of supermarket sushi for dinner, and had driven to the hospital swigging from a bottle of Pepto Bismol.

The little girl was bright, energetic and full of curiosity about the world around her. Sometimes, Trisha felt beat by her own genetics, and mused grimly on her union with the high school biology teacher.


© Sara Gaddis 2010