Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Author:Tochi Onyebuchi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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Ella has seen nothing but hospital rooms. At Mama’s bedside, her hand on Mama’s while Mama sleeps, swimming deeper and deeper into Mama’s mind, then letting the current pull her wherever it wishes, she sees nothing but hospital rooms.

A sound. A beep. When Ella looks up, Mama’s on a table in a small, dark room with a monitor hooked to her, her swollen belly wet with gel, her face turned to the monitor where she watches the heartbeat beep and beep. Ella follows her gaze, watches the green lines trace mountain peaks and valleys, then slowly turn to chicken scratching. In the ultrasound, the grainy image of a fetus moves, then stops. A nurse leaves the room, but there’s someone else there, dressed in a multicolored gown with beads around her neck and wrists. She holds a bag, and the odor of lavender wafts luxuriously from it. The two of them, Mama and the black lady, stare at each other, and Ella watches the black lady smile reassurance into a Mama who looks younger than Ella ever remembers her being.

“I’m anxious,” Mama says. “But I’m ready.”

“You’re ready,” the lady says back. She reaches into her sack and pulls out papers covered in crayon scribblings. Affirmations like “I can do this” and “I am loved” and “I am strong.”

The doctor returns and says to the room, “We don’t want to wait. We’re going to get her out now.” And Ella follows the nurse and her mother and this other woman up several flights of stairs to the labor and delivery unit, and the woman changes into purple scrubs, her sack now filled with snacks she got from the vending machine on the ground floor.

Ella stands by the wall as the doctor, brisk and white, enters with a clipboard in his hands. “Have you had any children before?” the doctor asks without looking up.

The woman frowns. “Have you even read her file?” And the two of them glare at each other for a moment.

“A stillborn,” Mama says, and the air vanishes from Ella’s lungs. This is new. She has never been here before. She’d walked through so many of Mama’s memories that she could describe them down to the chipping on the walls: Mama leaving abusive partners, Mama at church, Mama at the club with girlfriends, Mama praying by her bed at their home in South Central, Mama as a kid running through Mississippi backyards. How deep Ella must have gone to get here. But she doesn’t try to leave, doesn’t try to force herself out of the memory. The current brought her here. Mama brought her here.

“The demise was last year?”

Mama stiffens at the word.

The woman touches the doctor’s arm and says, “May I speak to you outside?”

After a moment, Ella follows them, passing through the door as though it were a curtain, and she watches the woman tell the doctor to please make a note in Mama’s chart about the stillbirth, how every time she has to recite her trauma, Mama’s mind goes back to that place of anxiety and fear and heartbreak.

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