Excerpt: Within Reach (Subject to Change)

“Ahhhh!” cried a girl only two years from twenty as she lay on a hospital bed. Her wavy black hair fell around and into her face and lay in a tangled mess spread out on her pillow Strands of her hair, matted with sweat, stuck to her face. Sweat streamed from her brow down her cheeks and dripped off either side of her head into her hair. Her dark skin seemed almost gray as she screamed and thrashed her head as her left hand occasionally reached to her bulging stomach.
A young man fresh out of his teenage years bent over her, clasping her right hand above her in both of his pale, thin hands. All the color was gone from his face. His lips were pressed against her bony brown hand and tears flowed from his closed eyes. Occasionally a stray tear slipped onto his hands, and slid down onto hers and down her arm into the sleeve of her hospital gown, but otherwise the majority slid down his cheeks and dripped off of his chin.
A fit female in white scrubs wearing latex free gloves seemed to be reaching inside of the girl’s legs, which were spread wide in opposite directions. The noise was unbearable. The girl’s shrieks and screams seemed to cover up the other sounds, drowning out the buzzing and beeping of the various hospital equipment and something that the woman in scrubs was trying to say to the two. Then for a moment, it seemed as though the hospital had become eerily silent only a split second that seemed like decades to the two. The silence was pierced by a loud cry, an infant’s cry.
The girl laying on the hospital bed was gasping for breath and groaning as blood poured out of her. The man opened his mouth and lowered his and the girl’s hand for a minute, but then the girl screamed again and it seemed as though her eyes had rolled into the back of her head. The woman in scrubs handed the baby to a man in scrubs that stood just behind her and turned back to the woman. “The other one is coming,” she said.

“Will she make it?” the man asked.
There wasn’t time to answer. The girl screamed again, but then suddenly stopped screaming. “I…” she gasped.
“Trista!” the man cried as he clasped the girl’s hand tighter in his and lowered himself so that their eyes could meet.
“I feel nothing,” she wheezed. There was no light in her brown eyes and her thick lips were pulled into a blank line, “Call him Nothing….”
“I…I can’t call him Nothing, Trista!” the man gasped.
“Call him Zero…my Zero…” she said as her hand, so warm before, went cold in his grasp.

“Trista!” the man sobbed as the woman’s eyes closed and her arm went limp.
The woman in scrubs held another child in her arms which she was carefully wiping clean. There was a third woman in the room who had been trying to stop Trista’s bleeding, but could be of no help. Trista was already gone. “I am sorry for your loss,” the other woman said to the man.
The man kissed the girl’s hand one more time and gently laid it over her breast as he looked up at the doctor who had addressed him. Tears poured down his cheeks as he gazed at the doctor, the girl, and then at the woman holding onto his child. This child was pale. The other had been dark, like his mother. “Where…where is my son?” the man asked.
“Right here,” said the woman in white scrubs as she handed the man the pale baby.
“My other son!” the man gasped.
Both woman took a look around the room. “I’m not sure,” said the woman in white scrubs, “I’ll go see where he went. He probably took the baby to the nursery. I’ll go look.”
“Thank you,” said the man, and then he hiccupped. He continued to cry as he carefully wiped off what was left of the blood on the pale newborn baby. His whole body trembled as the baby broke into a soft cry and its body twitched.