Blue Parcel

She stared out the window of the moving taxi and a sudden nausea swept over her. Came close to uncontrollable but she held onto the nothingness in her stomach, 2 more stops and the ride is over. Thankfully no one has looked her in the eye since she got into the taxi. She barely breathes her chest heavy and eyes deep sunk. No one notices her slippers.

Perhaps it’s the culmination of the stiff heat, oppressive taxi fumes and end day body odor that is threatening to dissolve the thin veneer of normality she is desperately holding onto. A sweat drop makes it way from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine. She betrays nothing. The sleeping parcel in her arms has not moved an inch since the journey began. She swallows and keeps staring straight ahead.

It’s not meant to be this way. She imagined it differently. She visualizes the end of the ride, imagines unwrapping the parcel. Her thoughts echo through her skull. As if to erase whats going on in her head, her left hand shoots up to her forehead where she rubs her temples in a clockwise rotation, slowly at first but then as the images of the last 24 hours flash her minds eye her index finger slows down. She processes each of the mental flash cards like a two year old learning to read. Trying to find a deeper meaning in the apparent, she painstakingly examines each of the images. The blood. The screams and the look in his eye.

She sent him home first thing this morning. Her sleep deprived body trembled lightly but her voice was steady, she ordered him to go. His heavy presence after the ordeal made matters worse. His love a recrimination of her as an incompetent woman, a vessel broken can’t be called a vessel any more, then what are you? What will you be known as?

She is a failure. She is bare. She is not a woman anymore.

Somewhere after they accepted their fate and before she made this life changing decision, something snapped. A chain of logic unhinged. It’s broken, I have to fix it. I have to do it alone. There was a stirring in her lap. She looked down. It’s her knees. She stops it from shaking. Blood. One more stop. Breathe. Taxi fare the driver barks. She does not trust her voice and digs her hands into her bra, fishing for the crumpled notes she hastily stuck in there. The driver momentarily obsessed with the petit figure hazily digging in her bra is struck by the parcel in her lap. Wrapped in blue, still of undeterminable shape. She hands over a note. It has a stain but he does not mind. The strange lady keeps staring ahead. Suddenly her hand falls from her brow onto the door. She is fidgeting with the handle. Her other arm grabbing tightly onto the parcel. Hey wena! He shouts where you going, she shoots a look at him. It nearly made him swerve, out she mouths. The look in her eyes terrified him. Blood shot red, and deep.

Stop! The voices in her head a cacophony of sounds, her sleep deprived senses heightened and dull at the same time. The nausea comes over her like waves one heaving farther than the other determined to bring up the nothingness in stomach. She holds on as the driver suddenly stops the taxi.

Without looking at him she gets out and starts to walk. No idea of where her legs are carrying her but acutely aware of the dribble of red snaking down her leg she hears the sound of sirens. She holds onto the parcel determined she walks on. She can’t see anything anymore; she can only hear screams. And the long uninterrupted beep. The sound of resignation in their voices, his eyes, it use to be lovers eyes but now, and the florescent light. The sickening smell of blood and physical exertion, the sirens. So loud. She felt her knees weakening. She could not differentiate between sirens and screams, what was real or whether it was imagined.

Her feet unsteady, now unaware of the blue parcel her eyes clouded with tears she stumbles and falls.

The parcel flew open and lay in the sand on the side of Main Road. She fell down beside it, broken.

The sirens drew closer; she had been missed shortly after her hasty retreat from the obstetricians ward, she was spotted walking in this direction, the taxi driver recognized her as the cheerful pregnant lady always so polite, he alerted the authorities.

She must have lay there for an eternity, the cold clamped onto her blood soaked legs, her perfectly formed blue baby lie even stiller beside her. Blood mixed with sand mixed with dirt caked onto the face of the little still born boy. This is how she remembers the end of her life starting.