And the Numbers That Fade

Seven weeks and six days. I couldn’t stop thinking about the numbers. I’ve been here for eight hours. At half an inch long, it is about the size of a blueberry with webbed fingers and toes. Out of wedlock birthrates among black women is seventy-two percent, fifty-four percent for hispanic women, and twenty-nine percent for white women. I was doomed to be a statistic either way. The procedure took five minutes, though it felt longer than the whole day I was there, as if the hands of the clock stubbornly refused to move. Fact: Abortion has killed more black Americans than crime, accidents, cancer, and AIDS. In a daze. I didn't hear the nurse say it was over. A wave of cramps wash over my lower body leaving a paralyzing feeling in my legs. I remembered the nurse had taken the final ultrasound image. I lifted my head a little to see but I didn't have the courage to look that time either so I averted my eyes to the ceiling but I knew it was pitch black. I could no longer hear any lightning that ripples through the clouds or feel the avalanche of Wednesday’s pizza ready to erupt on my coat. The worst is over now. All that’s left to do is count the catastrophes. I call this my own personal genocide. I put on my clothes and swallow the antibiotic pill as the nurses speak but I cannot hear. It is all silent. It is all silence. It all fades. It all fades.