As a Friend

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And where is he, the biological father of the unborn child? States away. On a New Orleans tugboat in violent Gulf water. Nor will he make it so far up the river again, with five weeks’ pay and anaconda boots, looking for a lovely girl’s ear to nibble, and with half a notion, steadily declining, to betroth his charismatic loathsomeness to whatever sad someone might part her lips for him, take in his torrent of lies, and mistake him for whatever he surely is not.

The mother of the pregnant girl (some would say child) places her King James on the cane chair outside the second-floor door. Then she enters the room.

In the same glance by which she recognizes her daughter, in a cotton gown and long socks, flailing on the gurney, moaning Oh God Oh God, she sees the empty metal stirrups poking like weird levers from the gurney’s sides. She hears her daughter’s moans and fixes her eyes on the stirrups which seem, in their cold metallic gleaming, in her fatigue and anxiety, to authorize her daughter’s suffering.

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