no words

No-one told me my baby was dead. They didn't need to.

Just before they brought me into the operating room, one of the residents fastened a plastic bracelet around my wrist. It was for identification, she said. They would put a matching one on the baby's wrist. Or her ankle, if her wrists turned out to be too small. I remember the relentless lights of the white room, the needle slipping into a vein and the doctor asking, "Can you feel this? Can you feel this?"

But after that, through the layers of darkness, I remember only one thing with any clarity at all. And that was the faraway feeling of fingers, pulling at my arm and unwrapping the bracelet. So when I woke up in the recovery room and the nurse came in to check on me, the only question I asked her was whether I could have a glass of water.