![]() ![]() ![]() For even though the cord had long been cut, there was clearly a connecting thread still between her battered womb and the infant’s taut belly both felt it achingly. ![]() It pounded through her veins, and surged from her to the child and back again. She surrendered abjectly to this new and terrible tenderness. ![]() Now that it was out, and wrapped in its own separate package of broody skin, it was so tangibly, deliciously real, that the thought of her previous indifference blurred her eyes with tears. The enormity of what had just occurred dazzled her: the idea of a baby, a new human being, had never seemed real when it was still inside her. She even experimented with crooning lullabies of love into the translucent shell of its dainty ear. She spent the next seventy-two hours staring into the new infant’s eyes and playing with the tiny fingers when it was awake, or nuzzling the downy head and sniffing the honey smell when it was asleep. “Go to sleep now,” the midwife told the maid who was now a mother, “You must rest, you’re so exhausted, lamb.”īut the mother was too elated to sleep. And the maid had to huff and to puff, and to puff and to huff, until finally she gave birth to a small bundle of child. Once upon a bed and long ago, there lay a maid. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |