The change to a dark, crisp mood of an early winter morning in 1968 turned the memory switch on and I would hate to see the invoice. I was barely two years old lying on my back, dumb to a single detail: I was here in a hospital room, the walls were blank, I was bronchial and looking through plastic from behind a tent.
Turning my head right to left to right to left, nothing gave meaning to anything. A line of light appeared for a door that likely opened onto the fray of a pediatric ward in the early morning hours, but in the room the line was only a difference which I noticed in no mood until, my heart and cries bolting out of my chest, I saw a nurse in surgical cap and gown looking down on me and reaching in. Did we live happily ever after?
Submitted by Gina B. Lives in the United States, earned an MFA in creative writing in 2003, and has a few short pieces of fiction and nonfiction published in Redivider, BRAND, and the Feminist Review.