It’s tiny.
It's pink and slimy and lets out tiny inaudible noises that make Sam want to cry. The baby has a mini pink knit hat on her head and is wrapped in a white and black cow blanket that engulfs all of it except for the head that sticks out. Sam feels like someone is dragging sandpaper along her cheeks and, wait…she is crying.
Burning drips of salty water melt through her moldable skin like play-dough, why does she feel more fragile than this newborn?
“Her name is-”
“I don’t want to know.” Sam's voice is cold, despite the gurgle that the baby chokes out, and she wonders if this baby will grow up just like her. Trapped in a circle of pain that she has to fight to get out of, but it never leaves her. The pain is like gum trapped to her shoe. Some days it’s easy to forget it's there, but others it's obvious for her to see it, to feel it. It catches her feet and makes her stumble in her path, and until now it was just a pain she felt, but now this tiny baby will have to bear it too.
“Isn’t it exciting?” The mother smiles naively as Sam catches the way the mother’s hospital gown falls off her shoulders. The pill capsules next to her bedside are empty but Sam doubts it sits in her stomach. Maybe she threw it in the plant pot in the corner, or maybe down the drain?
She hates how easy it is for her sister to fool people, only a few weeks ago she was in the county jail for beating their mother till she bled, yet now she sits in a hospital bed, unchained and capable of a crime worse than murder.
Life.
Sam sees her sister with a needle hanging out of her arm and her hands wrapped around the baby's neck. She imagines the baby crying and shitting itself, starving while her mother invites another man into the house and gets pregnant over and over till the doctors and CPS workers say enough is enough.
They will never say enough is enough.
Because the children who experience trauma will always be in a never ending cycle that the world turns a blind eye too. No one came for Sam, and no one would come for this baby.
“Aren’t you happy to be an aunt?” It’s accusatory, and her smile is malicious in the poor hospital lighting. Her sister would turn this baby against Sam by telling her of the horrible aunt who cried unhappy tears when she was born. “A good aunt would want to know their niece's name.” Sam's sister is ten years older than her and they share a different father. Sam used to pray that her mother would tell her that she was adopted, that this family she grew up in didn’t run in her blood. The abusers, the drug-users, the manipulators, they were all a part of her and she wished it was something she could scrub off herself and pick until it disappeared. It followed her around like a glossy haze that she couldn’t get rid of. It weighed her down and showed her that true happiness was never something that she could experience, and those parts of her that connect her to her family are the things she hates the most.
She watches her sister's lips part and they make a sound, an audible noise that Sam doesn’t want to hear because all she says are lies. ‘I’ve been going to therapy,’
‘I’m going to be a better mom’ (never sister),
‘I won’t hurt you anymore.’
It hits her like a train and she wonders if there's a gas leak in the building and if it’s messing with her brain.
She doesn’t give the baby another look and leaves the room on swift feet, passing the maternity ward and not stopping till she exits the swiveling doors and collapses in the spiky grass outside the horrid walls that reek of death, even around life. There are light pink peonies, like the baby's hat, growing out of a small patch near a hospital garden sign. A monarch butterfly flaps its wings and floats in front of her and a gentle breeze wipes the tears from her face with a soothing whisper. It’s cruel how beautiful it is. As if nature itself refused to give her another look, to even regard her pain with a gray cloud or drop of rain. The flowers would keep growing; the flowers would keep living. The world would keep moving on without her.
And the little baby would grow up,
Her sister named the baby Sam.