Black-eyed Kids - creative nonfiction
Only a few days home from the hospital. A few nights? There was no knowing in mid-June, in Alaska. The Mother and Baby unit, and her room in it, had had a wall full of windows and never achieved complete darkness even with the blinds fully down. After a labor achieved under a magnesium drip, her stay in the hospital was an obscenely long weekend of bleeding, feeding, sweating, nurses manhandling her breasts and pelvis, exhaustion, frustration, irregular meds, and less-than-mediocre food. She had begged for discharge. To be discharged from the hospital, that is. Discharges were aplenty for her and the little mewling fireweed jelly that was now hers forever. The bedroom in their overcrowded apartment had blackout curtains nailed over the windows, parted only perfunctorily for a narrow fan. This achieved, in contrast to the hospital, a perpetual near-nighttime. The air moved angrily, oscillated from the outside where temperatures “varied” from the sixties to the eighties. The little one...