Real Sugar is Hard to Find by Sim Kern

Author:Sim Kern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Android Press

***

When you wake on the third day, your husband is holding the baby in the vinyl recliner he’s been living in. He swears the baby just smiled at him, a minute before you woke up.

Later that morning, a nurse pulls the long line of the catheter out of you. You are made to stand and hobble five steps to the bathroom, leaning on the IV cart. Only then, using your atrophied legs to push against earth’s terrible gravity, do you understand just how badly you are broken.

But strength returns quicker than you expect. By the next morning, you are hale enough to step in the shower and wash off the film of rotting breastmilk and urine and baby puke coating your skin. You feel made new, pulling on a fresh gown.

You are given solid food. You are taken off the morphine drip, and the lactation nurse comes by and shows you how to pinch your nipples and shove them in the baby’s mouth. After a few hours of trying, she finally starts to suckle. Thatta girl. She tugs at your breast, triggering a surge of hormones, almost as good as those drugs they’ve stopped giving you. You cry. Your husband cries. Maybe you will heal, after all. Maybe you will get out of this hospital bed one day and be a real parent.

On the fifth day, you are sitting on the toilet, in pain worse than childbirth, because there is no epidural for this. But they’ve told you that after this milestone, you can go home. You brace one hand on the wall and scream as something rips out of you.

After, cleaning yourself, you feel a puff of icy air on your hand. A tiny bit, just a mouse’s breath. You tell yourself you imagined it, shoving down the dread in your chest.

But when you flush, there’s a rattling sound. The blood clears from the water, but shards of a hard, transparent substance sit at the bottom of the bowl. They look like melted glass.

The nurses who come to remove the objects with long, metal tongs don’t look like nurses. They’re built like weightlifters, and beneath those blue plastic suits, you glimpse camouflage.

What is going on? you ask, when the doctor arrives to check your incision.

You slipped a stitch, he says. I’ll pop another in.

No, what were those things that came out of me?

There are a few possibilities, he says, threading a long, curved needle. We’re running tests. How’s the pain?

Bad again. Almost like that first day.

The doctor asks the nurse to bring back the morphine drip. No more breastfeeding, then. No going home for you today.

The new stitches take just a few minutes. After, the doctor speaks quietly with your husband in the hall. He is to take the baby home. Get her settled in. You might be here a while longer.

He won’t say what a while is.

You hold your baby one last time, but she’s squalling for your breast, which you’re no longer allowed to give her, so it’s a quick embrace before your husband hurries her away.

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