Apparitions 3

by Feign

Posted to Stories on 2002-10-19 19:35:00

Yeah, Sam liked his work a little too much. Joe’s offhand tit remark made Sam nervous, and he wondered if Joe had any inkling of his midnight hobby.
Well, I guess my curiosity got the best of me, the two men decided to break for lunch and they left for about an hour. There was a steel stool in the room, I pulled it to the table and sat near the sheet covered corpse. It was quiet, soulfully quiet, like an empty church. I thought about what I saw when I looked into me. Funny, to be so detached from the life so fraught with odd emotions. Gently I lifted the sheet from the body. Her face was calm in death. In life, people often told her that they couldn’t read her. She’d laugh and say, “but I’m an open book.”
Her closed eyes were green, and I wondered,do eyes keep their color? I resisted the urge to find out.
I pulled down the sheet a little further, thinking that they really were going to have a job putting this babe back together again. Funny, “together.”
I exposed the window of the large incision,leaning over, glad the two men were gone. I needed the quiet. I needed to see into her without distraction.
The girl was in a car, with her mother and the guy who got her pregnant. The boy’s parents, fearful of her crazy father, had agreed to provide an abortion and thats why they were driving to Baltimore. Her mother was a wreck, having been dealt probably the biggest responsibilty of her life. The young man was desperate to get everything over with. He was not the same boy that kissed her to the music.The girl was rather calm, listening to the radio playing music from “Hair.” “good morning sunshine…”
The boy’s parents had apparently found a doctor that would perform an abortion, in those times a risky and illegal act. The girl sat listening to the music, thoughts randomly flitting through her head. No one spoke.
She wondered about Baltimore. She had never gone so far from home. Would it be very different than the grey coldness of the city she lived in? She considered ways of running once they got there. Could she outrun them? Even if she did, where could she go? What would she do? What about the baby? She stopped thinking and let the music flood her.She was 17 years old. She was pretty sure she didn’t care what happened to her.
They arrived at the doctors address, which surprisingly seemed to be a pretty nice neighborhood. He let them in himself, and sat with them, talking in vague terms about the abortion. The, he did a surprising thing. He told her mother that he wanted to talk to the girl alone. He took her into a comfortable looking office, and told her to sit down and relax. He sat at the desk and put his hands together before him in a tent-shape, and said, “I am going to ask you a question, and I want you to think very carefully before you answer.” The girl nodded slowly.
“Do you want an abortion?” he said softly.
The girl sat and thought.No one had ever asked her what she wanted. Dad said she would abort, that was it. Mom never said shit. The boy was pathetically grateful for the way out of a stupid mess. She thought about it carefully.Then she looked at the silent doctor and said one word. “No.”
Wordlessly the doctor got up and brought her back to the waiting room where the other two sat.The doctor said, This young lady doesn’t want an abortion, and I won’t do it.”
The ride back to Connecticut was silent except for the radio. Songs of sunlight and starlight and hair, hair ,hair, were the only sounds she heard as she prepared herself for the beating she knew was waiting for her at home.
I lifted my gaze and the mirror over the sink reflected my tear covered face. Time had stopped again, I had only been looking for a couple of minutes. I had plenty of time to find out about the girl so calmly dead. I had plenty of time to look inside of her…..


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