Nineteen

I was lying on the floor thrashing and wounded for what seemed like hours, though it might have been only minutes.  I was a gazelle, walking through the glade, gleaming white with sweat in the hot sun streaming through the trees.  My belly was swollen with child.  In the glade, I bent to gather leaves and grass to build a nest to support the descent of my youngling.  Instinctively, I leaned up against the wall in the room where the rising sun streamed in through the windows.  Then I was walking through a forest gathering berries for my coming child.  As a girl at home, my father took me in the forest to hunt for wild medicinal plants.  He carved the bark from trees and gathered leafy herbs.  I wished for one of his sedative herbs so I could sleep through this pain.  In the glade again now with my father, we hunted for wild grasses.  The chirp of crickets surrounded us.  Up ahead, I spotted a mother lioness with her cubs.  The lioness tenderly licked behind the ears of one of the cubs while the other two rolled and frolicked in the high grass.  I admired the mother’s love in an animal that powerful.

And now, I roared like that lioness when she saw us watching her from the trees.  Protectively, she had circled around her three cubs, roaring.  My father circled around me, protecting me.

“Hush, girl,” said Zena.  “Your baby will come if you’re quiet.”

I started, brought out of my sleepless dream when I heard an unexpected human voice that was not my father at my side.  I couldn’t talk.  I moaned low like the lioness in the forest glade.  My belly tightened.  My breathing was rapid and shallow.

“Look at me,” Zena whispered.  “Breathe slower.  The baby is low now.”  She pushed low in my belly.  “It won’t be long.  Now drink this.”

I wasn’t thirsty or hungry, but I took a sip of the hot, salty broth she held out to me.  I laid back on the forest floor, the lioness and her cubs gone.  My father and I ate some of the wild berries we had gathered as the sun dipped low behind the trees.

Suddenly, something grabbed me from behind, and I roared when I saw it was the lioness.  I thrashed and threw Zena’s hands and the blankets aside.  I scrambled to my knees and stood, growling, to protect my father and my unborn child from the lioness.  The lioness backed away, and the pain eased once more.  I crouched down against a tree in the forest, breathing heavily, and I looked for my father again.  He took my hand, and we left the forest to head home to where my mother would be waiting with dinner.

                I awakened again to the most intense, burning pain low in my belly and high between my thighs.  I got up from the bedclothes and crouched next to the window where the chimes blew in the wind.  I looked out over the trees to see the sun setting.  Just at the edge of the trees, I saw a man looking right at me.  From a distance, he looked like my father.  I squatted down on one knee and reached down to catch my baby by grasping her neck with one hand and her shoulder with the other.  I eased myself down to the thin mattress, holding my glistening baby girl in my arms.