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    I Am
    I Am
    I Am
    Ebook35 pages33 minutes

    I Am

    By Janice Daugharty

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The aborted boy is only a scrap of flesh but has a heartbeat like the fluttering of butterfly wings. Kate, nurse on duty, doesn't know what to do. This sixteen-week old baby was supposed to be delivered dead! It was a given. She's been trained under such unlikely circumstances to discretely place the fetus in a basin and set it on a shelf in the lab till its--his--heart quits beating. She can't.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJanice Daugharty
    Release dateMay 27, 2010
    ISBN9781452350417
    I Am
    Author

    Janice Daugharty

    Janice Daugharty is Artist-in-Residence at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, in Tifton, Georgia. She is the author of one story collection and five novels: Dark of the Moon, Necessary Lies, Pawpaw Patch, Earl in the Yellow Shirt, and Whistle.

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      Book preview

      I Am - Janice Daugharty

      I Am

      a story by

      Janice Daugharty

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2010 by Janice Daugharty

      Daugharty writes taut and vivid prose that brands white-hot images on your gray matter and makes you sit up straight with admiration. Washington Post Book World

      I Am

      She used to sing when she rocked her own baby, but Kate knows if she opens her mouth now the only sound that will come out is crying, and she’ll never be able to stop crying, so she hums. Lips sealed, humming, she rocks... Then she smiles.

      Inside Labor and Delivery, starting her twelve-hour shift, a yawning 6 am to 6 pm, Kate had found the nurses in pastel print scrubs gabbing at the front desk.

      Shelia, her fave, was sampling articles from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Every day she wore boxy, white cable-stitch cardigans over her uniforms, not for warmth but to conceal her straight-up-and-down, big-boned frame.

      What’s up? Kate said, stepping alongside her behind the main desk. In one hand was a small lumpy brown paper sack.

      Shelia lowered the paper to the white desktop, reading: Says here: `The Georgia legislature failed to reach a majority vote to administer pain meds to fetuses during abortion.’

      How come, did they say?

      Nope, that’s it. Shelia folded the paper and smiled at Kate. So, what’s our Kate been up to?

      Would you believe it if I said delivering a goat?

      Nooo?

      Cross my heart. Kate crossed her stocky arms over her loose blue cotton shirt.

      I gotta hear this story at lunch break. Shelia shook her head, swinging her thin silver hoop earrings.

      Kate’s wrenched right hand ached sweetly from helping deliver the baby goat last night—Kate did it! Kate was now the proven savior in the eyes of her daughter Myra. Fourteen years old, she’d squalled like a baby when she found her old broadside and blatting, struck in a pose of giving life while biting it back.

      Kate had long ago accepted that Myra would always be her baby—during prolonged labor, Kate’s umbilical had prolapsed, stifling Myra’s oxygen supply—just as Myra’s goats were her babies.

      Sometimes Kate’s whole life seemed a battle of birthings. She’d started as a girl on their South Georgia farm helping her daddy pull stubborn calves from rebellious cows. And now the goats—thirty-strong and on the increase. She guessed that becoming an OB nurse had been a natural progression from animal to human; besides, her mother had been a mid-wife before she died of breast cancer only weeks before Myra was born. But Kate’s decision to work in High-risk Labor and Delivery had everything to do with Myra—that curse turned into blessing.

      "You got a couple terminating a Downer this morning.

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