The Visit

Ready, set, go!  The RedWriting Hood prompt this week is flash fiction (300 word maximum) inspired by the single word: Life.  This is a little snapshot into Greta’s world; if you like what you see, more of her story can be found on my new page (see the last tab on my menu).

   

Greta wiped her sweating palms through her hair before pushing open the door to the maternity ward.  She stumbled, instead of stepped, into the hallway, the floor wavering in front of her.  Was it possible that the air was thinner here, four floors above ground level?

Swinging around the corner, she shoved the vestiges of fear into the black ball permanently settled in the bottom of her stomach.  She was impervious to the pain she had expected to feel.  Something was pushing the blood through her veins, but it was no longer her heart.  Her heart had stopped that day in her bloody shower then shattered in this very hospital, when the ultrasound confirmed what she already knew.

Glancing at the numbered doors, she glided forward.  There must have been voices laughing, babies crying, nurses bustling, but the only sound she heard was the whooshing that could have been her breath or the brushing of her shoes against the carpeting.

Her sister-in-law was leaning against the nurses’ station, forehead wrinkled quizzically, flipping through a sheaf of papers.  Silently thanking a God whose existence she had recently begun to question, Greta slid into the correctly labeled door.

Paul didn’t immediately look up, expecting his wife back from filling out the paperwork for his new daughter’s birth certificate, but his head snapped up with Greta’s inadvertent intake of breath.

Drawn forward, Greta moved closer to the simple bassinette. 

Knowing her so well, Paul skipped a hug, instead briefly touching her forehead, a gesture their mother had used to comfort them their whole lives.

Without thought, her eyes caressed the impossibly soft, chubby curve of her niece’s cheek, Greta’s mouth opening to breathe in the sweet air in the space above where her niece, where Elisabeth was sleeping, swaddled and safe.

Alive.