pre-frontal cortex

weeks had crawled by.

she lay on her bed, in that dark where you find either boogeymen or the answers to your unvoiced questions, with her hands resting on her belly. she slowed her breathing, slowed her thoughts. the baby stirred, no longer rocked internally by her daily activities. slow somersaults shifted it from one side to the other... something--a hand or a foot or a head or an ass--something pushed upwards, then settled back into the depths of her body with the same languid movement that was used to start the action. there, in the dark, in the pool of her breathing and the clock ticking, she could swear she heard it's contented sigh slip up through her pores.

trite but true.... she never thought she’d be in this position. it hadn’t been her first time making love, nor her first lover. what gave her a snort of irony lying there (she grasped irony, to her parent’s surprise), was that it was the first time she’d used any form of birth control...the first time she insisted a guy use a condom.

and it broke.

the result of that breakage dwell in that little sac of fluid, trying to get comfortable in smaller and smaller quarters--alice/alex ate the cake, and the room was becoming too tiny. a foot kicked, she poked back... tit for tat.

her parents. her friends. her teachers. her doctor. they all knew. she listened to the advice and lectures and laughter from each of them in different doses, different voices. the pile of adoption/abortion pamphlets had grown in her closet, each giving their version of what should be done, how to deal with this matter. they all begged her to choose them; offering early term, late term, parents who will love this child. they all offered her a way out of wonderland--this was a situation for adults, not 15 year old girls who liked to fuck, soooo...here, deal with it one way or another.

she picked the two best looking brochures, tweedledum and tweedledee, and left a message on the machines...another layer in the waiting game she played. having come to the fork in the road, she took it. neither option repelled nor attracted her. abortion. adoption. adoption. abortion. they were her version of ‘the morning after pill’, far too many mornings after. whomever called first, won.

she slept. the child slept, too... both of them curled on themselves. their dreams fluttered--she saw herself holding a little penguin or a cat or something with all the parts in the wrong place, wondering how she’d change it’s diaper. the child had dreams of it’s own--of all the the universe had told it--knowledge that was erased with the first breath of life. no one understood the reason babies cried with such anger at birth was not the shock of air on their once protected face, but, in sorrow over the loss of the answers to everything.

wrapped in silence, warmth, odd dreams, they heard the phone ring...

“hello?”

their collective future was decided.