Fiction

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Chapter One
From Miracle’s journal
My name is Miracle, but I don’t know who I am. The very world I thought I lived in and existed in is somehow across a great channel of time and space that I cannot go to. How can I explain it when I can’t begin to understand it myself? Is my reality even real? Today everything I thought to be real is not. This much is true, that I have a mother and three brothers and two sisters, and we live in a big old house on a fifty acre homestead in a place called Precinct V (five).
The day started out the same as every other day, at least since my great grandparents passed. They shared this home with us too until then. They’ve been gone a few months now. I miss them horribly. It is they that taught me while Mom went to the infirmary to work everyday, sometimes long days. Nanna taught me how to sew and to bake and cook, and Pappy taught my brothers how to plant and tend the fields, and they both taught us all how to care for the animals. Chickens, goats, lambs, pigs, and horses…and strays, namely one--Fat Cat, the best mouser ever.
My Uncle Buddy came over today. Actually he’s my great uncle. My mom has no brothers or sisters. He is the only visitor we ever get except for every other Sunday when the preacher comes. I overheard him talking to Mom when neither thought I was near. It wasn’t my intention to eavesdrop. In our house there are no secrets, or at least that is what I thought until today.

“Angela, what would happen to the children if something happened to you?” I heard my uncle ask.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Mom answered.
“But you have to. You have to at least think about it. I’m not getting any younger. You’ll have no family when I’m gone. Or at least none that will acknowledge your existence.”
My mom let out a long laborious sigh, and she put her head in her hands. I think she was crying. Her shoulders shook but she kept in any sound.
“Miracle needs papers. All of the children do, but at least if something were to happen to you she could continue on here.” Uncle Buddy paused for a moment before continuing. He lifted Mom’s face to look at his own and finally said, “The world you‘ve created for them doesn‘t exist.”
“Maybe someday it will again.” I could see a tear crawl down Mom’s face like it had hands and knees, slowly and deliberately, and then she blinked and a curtain of them fell.
It was rare for Uncle Buddy to show emotion. Oh, he would laugh at a funny joke and compliment a tasty meal, but if one of us kids fell and scraped a knee or cried, he’d say something like, “That’ll teach you to do that again.” So in this extraordinary moment of compassion he bent down and patted Mom on the knee and said, “I’d like that too. To see the world the way it used to be, or at least our corner of it.”
Mom looked at him and tried to smile. I could tell it was an attempt at one anyway.
“Are you going to tell Miracle soon?” He asked.
I couldn’t help but want to listen more. Tell me what?
“Only when I have to,” she answered sounding defeated.
“She needs to know. She’s a young woman now. She’s bound to figure some things out on her own. I’ll see what I can do. About the papers.”
As soon as the words left his lips Mom pleaded, “No! That would be too dangerous. You’re the only family I have left and you can’t risk it. Aunt Dorene wouldn‘t allow it anyway.”
“Shhh. I know what I’m doing. Don’t worry about me. It will be curfew by the time I get home. I need to get going, but you think about what I said.”
Mom nodded, “Okay.” She hugged him, and he left.
That was that. I had no idea of what just transpired. I watched Mom as she watched Uncle Buddy leave. When he was gone she went out to the field past the border of trees that we’re never allowed beyond.
I checked on my brothers and sisters who were all safe and sound in their rooms getting ready for bed but not asleep yet. Following from a safe distance I watched as Mom knelt down at the tree line. It was near dusk, a late sunset on a July summer day.
My eyes scanned the top of the hill as it crested. I didn’t know what my eyes beheld. There must have been a total of twelve wooden crosses in rows of three with neatly displayed shrubs in between them. The crosses had words on them but none of them recognizable to me. None were my grandparents. Their bodies had been cremated in the Precinct, and Mom and all of us children had made special plaques with their names outside of their favorite garden spot on our property.
“Mom,” I said, finally with the courage to speak. “What’s wrong? And why have you been crying?”
She turned startled. “You’re not supposed to be up here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought there was something wrong so I followed you. It’s okay if we’re both here together, isn’t it?”
Mom nodded. “It’s okay.”
I could finally read the names on the crosses. They weren’t common names like Paul, or John, or even pet names like Fluffy or Whiskers. They were declarations. “You are loved,” said one. “You are special,” said another.
“Mom,” I asked. “Who are these…?” I didn’t know how to finish because I didn’t know if they were even people.
“Babies…beautiful tiny babies.”
I looked at her, puzzled. I am the oldest. I never understood how my mother, a single lady, could show no signs of pregnancy even after I figured out the time line as I got older and there became more time difference between my youngest siblings and me. That was always a mystery to me. Whenever I brought up the subject, she would say I was delivered to her by angels, truly heaven sent. I never had a father. None of us did. Even my grandparents were able to skirt that one question. It became a game to them to see which one could outdo the other’s fabricated story of how I “bloomed from a rare rose shrub” or how a young peasant woman who had given up all her meager belongings to leave me in a golden basket as the “chosen one that would someday save the world from an evil king.” It became apparent that I was never going to get the answer I was looking for¾a truthful one.
“Why are they here?” I asked. I thought I would start with “why” first, and then continue with “how” and “when” later.
“They needed a proper burial.” Mom answered the question very matter-of-factly.
“But why here?”
“I couldn’t save them.” Mom’s expression was now somber and distant.
“Whose babies are these? They’re not yours.”
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“Start with that one there,” I said pointing to the most recent date on the cross.
“At the infirmary nurses are assigned different wards. Mine until five years ago was the neonatal unit. I cared for the newborns until they were able to leave the hospital with their mothers.”
“I still don’t understand though. Those babies,” I said pointing to the grave markers, “would have been given a proper burial by their birth mothers.”
Mom didn’t speak.
“You have to tell me, Mom. Why did you say you ‘couldn’t save them?”
“They were…aborted.”
I know what that word means. I don’t have a formal education, but I’ve been schooled by the best¾my grandparents and my mom. My vocabulary is very good.
“The pregnancy was stopped? But why? That’s wrong!” I said emphatically.
“But it’s legal.”
“But that doesn’t make it right.”
“Our government wants perfect people.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Nobody’s perfect. So they can just decide that because I don’t look a certain way that I’m useless?”
“You’re not useless. You have a purpose.”
Now I sat silent, not able to comprehend it all. Why?
Mom continued, “Sometimes it would be my duty to do the incinerator. It was forbidden to enter after the doctors, but one day I looked through the window on the door and saw in all the mountain of tiny limbs and fingers and toes, and one of them moved. I sneaked in and brought the live baby home. I continued doing so until my duties changed and I had no access to the neonatal ward or the incinerator.”
I looked at my mom now with a sudden realization that one of those babies she was talking about had been me!
“Extracted like a rotten tooth! Discarded like trash! I was never even born, was I?” I screamed, and then my rage turned into self-pity. My volume lowered as I almost whispered, “I was expelled, like a splinter in an infection. Nobody wanted me.”
“I wanted you,” said my mom caressing my cheek. “Like I never wanted anything else.”

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