Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Nobody in the hospital gets in my way, but they’re not exactly helping either.
“Freya!”
I call her name.
“Selene!” I hear her voice coming from one of the rooms in the absolute warren of a place. I follow that sound like it’s my own personal North Star. She’s not in the emergency room. They’ve wheeled her into the part of the hospital where they try to make it look slightly less hospital-ish with a mural of land spirits gamboling over rolling hills and forests. It reminds me of the lands where I tended my goats.
I find her in one of the birthing suites, a calm place with traditional music being played. The walls are painted a deep green, and there are several living plants in the room as well. It’s a nice place to give birth.
But my sister is not due for another week.
Freya is sitting up in bed. In the short time it took me to get past the firefighter and find her, they’ve managed to get her into a hospital gown and wipe away most of the smut from the fire. She still smells like wood char, but I notice there aren’t bandages. She wasn’t burned. That’s a miracle we will all be grateful for, for a very long time.
I rush to her side and wrap my arms around her. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m here.”
“Selene,” she says, her voice racked with obvious pain as she utters my name. “It’s happening.”
“What’s happening?” I am asking perhaps the most stupid question possible.
A doctor enters the room at a quick stride. “The stress of the fire has triggered labor,” she says. “It’s time to welcome the little one.”
“Selene,” Freya says again, reaching for me. “I need you. Don’t leave me.”
She looks so stricken and so scared.
“They literally couldn’t make me leave you if they tried,” I promise her. “I’ll glue myself to you if I have to.”
She smiles a little at that. “I am serious,” I say. “I’ll nail myself to the floor. I’ll cement myself to the pipes. I’ll reincarnate as a hospital bed…”
“Okay,” she says. “I get it. You can stay as a person. Just don’t…”
“I’m here,” I promise her, just as a contraction makes her contort with pain.
This does not look like much fun.
I’ve helped goats have babies before. It doesn’t look like much fun for them either. There’s a lot of blood, bleats of pain, and pushing, a great and terrible effort on which life and death hang.
Freya grips my hand as tight as she can, so tight I’m not sure I’m going to get that appendage back. I don’t mind. She can have it.
I knew I needed to be here. Everything in my gut and the rest of my body besides told me to follow after her. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I was making polite conversation with a bulky firefighter, or sitting in a waiting room right now.
Humans have a much harder time than goats, I learn. Freya is like a warrior, sweating, pushing, gasping for air at times.
My eldest sister is an absolute beast. Over the next two hours, she shows me that she is so much more than I ever understood her to be. She stops being the person I knew and becomes a portal for life itself. There is blood. There are tears. There are cries. I am in awe as she performs a miracle for the second time.
The moment I hear her daughter cry, I feel a chill run across me and through me. This is a moment like no other. The mundane is stripped away and I am given an understanding of life in a way that I have never experienced before, and may very well never feel again.
Two hours later, Freya is sitting up in bed, alert and alive, and holding her baby in her arms. She’s had a shower, another great feat in my eyes, and we’ve braided her hair. The baby has been washed and swaddled, and all is well. Normality has reasserted itself. The hallowed moment has faded. She’s eating jelly and the baby is looking at the world with a glassy-eyed confusion that is frankly highly relatable.
The good news is Freya’s husband is on an interstellar courier rocketing toward our position. I’m looking forward to pointing out that he missed the birth again.
For the moment, there’s peace. There’s something about a baby that makes everything seem like it’s okay, even when everything is pretty awful. We just lost our family’s legacy, but it doesn’t seem to matter in this moment. I know intellectually that I care; I just can’t quite bring myself to feel it.
“What’s her name going to be?”
“Brenna,” she says.
Brenna is the Old Norse verb meaning ‘to burn.’ As names go, it is quite on the nose.
“You’re naming her after the fire?”