A Birth
“She’s a beaut, ain’t she?”
Evette knew the old nurse didn’t expect a response, but she nodded dutifully, readjusting her hand underneath the curls tickling her palm. The infant’s puckered mouth latched at her breast. Sooty, round eyes looked straight up at hers. How could Evette not get lost in them? They didn’t loll around aimlessly, but that small set of eyes remained fixed on Evette as if she knew who she was immediately. She felt exposed.
“And how’s mama Wilson feeling?”
Evette rolled her head away from the nurse’s kind prodding and towards the window with a grunt. Outside the hospital, the moon hung heavy and bright in the night sky. She wondered what this full moon meant. Ruby would know it all. What this season held for her. Her new daughter’s sun sign, rising, and moon. The kind of kid she might become in life, independent of whoever’s hands guided her through it.
Full, the baby pulled her face away from Evette’s chest and gurgled softly. The nurse gently scooped the child from her arms and returned the doughy squirming body to the bedside bassinet.
“It eventually gets better,” she whispered to the back of Evette’s head, giving her shoulder a light squeeze before tip-toeing away from the bed.
Evette had a quiet baby on her hands. She wasn’t much of the praying type anymore, but at that small reprieve she gave thanks. That meant she could sleep just enough to let a dream pull her away from her unfamiliar new body and the fresh leaks and aches that plagued it. Away from the blanks in the birth certificate. Away from Mr. and Mrs. Abrams who sat waiting patiently in the hallway, a delicate, orderly pair that came prepared to leave as three — finally complete.
Although hazy, Evette could see the child’s day-old face in her mind, and what she imagined it to be in five year’s time. Ten. Twenty. Her lips, nose, eyes. Pieces of her. Pieces of him.
Evette had anticipated a stranger. She didn’t expect for her to feel so much like her own — for the tiny body she held to feel like a crackling fireplace emitting the kind of drunken warmth that thawed ice from the inside out. For nine months, Evette worked hard to keep a distance, extinguishing naming conversations before they started, insisting that was for the new parents to figure out. She’d clouded her head with nothings to get away from the one thing she couldn’t outrun; idle steps on a treadmill to nowhere.
Maxine Rose. Evette didn’t expect the name to come to her that way. It was a name that she and Ruby had thrown around in jest; a play-thing between best friends not meant to become real. It was a favorite song that turned into a running joke between them, a Chaka Demus classic that sent grown women’s waistlines into overdrive: “Now yuh heard about this girl, her name is Maxine. Her beauty’s like a bunch of rose…”
They’d toss their still-forming hips from the safety of Ruby’s bedroom, belting the lyrics outfitted in the best patois a second-generation Jamaican and her copycat Yankee neighbor could muster, imagining themselves at bashment parties their parents would never let them set foot into until they were at least 18. And now all that bellowed between Evette’s ears was Maxine. Not Abrams, but Wilson.
Tears stung at her eyes as she came to, hands on her still-swollen belly, swaying her head softly to a beat no one else in the room could hear — her future sealed between a melody and a dream.
Stacy-Ann Ellis is a multidisciplinary creative who has spent the past 10+ years rotating professional hats as a journalist, photographer and copywriter. Her evenings, however, are spent writing fiction and screenplays. While her reporting has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, GQ and others, she is realizing her literary publication dreams with a novel-in-progress and other short stories. Stacy-Ann holds a BA in Print Journalism with a minor in photography from Howard University, and currently lives in Queens, New York, where she was born and raised.
