Suspicious River by Laura Kasischke

Author:Laura Kasischke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I was cold, naked to the waist on a table. A nurse, the one with the jaw like a man’s, was squeezing my hand. The whir of kitchen machinery between my legs, and I heard my mother scream, perfectly, above me. From the round ceiling light, or from the huge glass jar of cotton balls on the counter next to the tissue box and rubber gloves, I heard my mother scream, “You’re killing me.”

A last electric hum, and it was done.

Quiet, shining, empty weight, and that round light in my eyes.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?”

The nurse leaned down to me to say it, and the light behind her head blacked out her face. I didn’t say anything, but I held tight to the nurse’s hand. She said, then, “It’ll just take the doctor a few more minutes to put the IUD in, then we’ll take you to another room to rest.”

Rest, I thought.

Water was running in another room. From one room to another room. From a distant source, fast, maybe miles and miles away, and the rush of it passed through pipes in the wall near me, sounding pressurized. A river. A warm flush. The doctor cleared his throat between my legs and prodded me open with his rubber gloves and with something metal like the barrel of a gun. A door, half closed—he was propping it open, saying nothing. I couldn’t see him, and I thought of the dentist, his face close to mine while he ran his fingers over my teeth. Our breath on each other, mingling—his, airways warm and yellow—and I’d close my eyes so the dentist wouldn’t have to look into them while he leaned seriously across my body, into my face.

But the IUD felt like a fishhook going in, and I caught my breath. Snagged, I thought. The ceiling light seemed to reel me up out of darkness, blinding me with air, as if I’d suddenly been born—wet with sweat, not screaming, spilling bloody onto a stainless steel table into a stranger’s sterile gloves. And I never did see the doctor’s face—just his back as he left the room, the loose blue surgical scrubs hanging off his bony shoulders, angular as a mannequin.

The nurse left, afterward, too, so I could put my clothes back on. I stood up and dropped the white hospital drape on the table where I’d been lying. The table was wrapped in white paper, like a mummy, a gift, or a steak. I slipped a spring dress with pink flowers over my arms, and then I held tightly to the edge of that table so I wouldn’t fall, and I touched myself between the legs before I slipped my underwear on. Blood. On my fingers. On the linoleum under me. I took a tissue out of the box on the counter near the glass globe of cotton, and I leaned down to clean up the floor. Glare, a rush of liquid in my ears and then the rush of an empty cup.

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