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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
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      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
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    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
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  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
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Benjamin Kessler

To Be Born


          I was a difficult birth.
          Breech. Ass first into the world, my jelly body folded up like a levered chair. The summer, stretching into fall and filling the house with flies come up from the earth around the well, had exhausted everyone.
 
          “That night was a boot on my neck,” mother told me.
           Long labor. Longest the midwife had seen, and dangerous.
          “He’s got the blue about him,” the midwife had said, gently shaping my not yet formed skull with her thumbs wet with amniotic fluid.
          My father had been pacing between the yard and sitting room, failing to smoke, the matchstick flame flickering out with the tremor of his hand. Every so often he would linger outside the bedroom door, his face pressed up against the wood, and speak softly.
          “Is everything okay? I don’t hear crying.”
          The women would lie. Why worry him? If I died it wouldn’t be as a result of his inattention.
          The midwife put her ear to my chest, listened for heartbeat, for breath. She pinched the fat of my leg. She wanted me to cry out as though my thick-throated wailing would be the peal of a bell announcing life. She palmed my chest and turned me over like someone inspecting the doneness of a loaf of bread. She drummed her fingers along my back.
          “Look at the hair,” my mother said, just now propping herself up fully. Sweat inked her own hair to her cheeks, her forehead. She reached out to stroke my face but the midwife pulled back. 
          “Wait.”
          “He’s not going to make it, is he.”
          “Wait, I said.”
          And they did, my mother still tethered and patiently watching my limp body, my father metrically knocking and the subsequent sound of his footsteps receding out the front door. Cricket song found silence in the room suffused with heat, until, like a great held breath, my mouth opened and I shrieked. The midwife cut the umbilical cord rough with a knife and passed me to my mother, who pressed my slick body against her bare chest glossy with sweat.
          Afterwards the midwife slept in the sitting room, spread out across two kitchen chairs. Her smock was stained with formless outlines of blood.
          “Always there is blood.” That midwife, Hattie Grace, told me all of this piecemeal throughout my childhood. Every autumn she would pick clean the apple tree at the border of our property, a sort of long-term token of gratitude from my parents. I would sit on what was left of the rotted fence and watch as her hands, the same that had pushed around the gummy bones in my head, would pluck the fruit from the tree. She would always remove the stem, littering it into the grass, before placing the apple into a woven basket.
          “Though that wasn’t the end of the trouble,” Hattie told me.
          The heat broke in the days following my birth and rain poured in endless sheets, soaking the ground and bringing worms up through the soil. The house flooded and the crib my father built was propped up on crates to clear the standing water, which would later leave a permanent ring near the baseboard.
          My mother took to melancholy, often holding me to her breast absentmindedly and then, after having nearly forgotten my presence, passing me to my father. Then she would roll onto her side and stare out the window streaked with the persistent rain.
          “Have you given any thought to a name?” my father asked. The two of them were lingering beside the hearth, soaked socks and pants drying on a metal spindle near the fire.
          “None.”
          “He needs a name.”
          To this my mother said nothing, instead only watching as a log split in the heat of the flame, a plume of smolders spit against brick. During this time my father slept in the same configuration Hattie had the night I was born, blanket eaten through by moths barely covering his body.
          “It’s too hot with both of us in there,” my mother had told him, pulling the sheets around herself. When I would cry during the night he would enter the bedroom and rock me in the inelegant way he knew, and I would spit up over his nightshirt. A month passed like this, my mother inattentive except to put me to her breast, holding me limp as she stood before the window and watched horses pass by on the road skirting the river.
          “She felt responsible for nearly killing you,” Hattie told me, reaching on tiptoe for the apples not yet touched by insects.
          I suppose now I can understand. She felt helpless, like she couldn’t control her own body, couldn’t birth a child as her mother had, and countless others far back in her lineage. When she finally did choose a name for me, after the spontaneous sobbing had abated and her and my father were again sharing a bed, it was like an act of permanence. By naming me she affirmed my place in the world. I was someone, not simply Esther’s baby—you know the one, who nearly died, purple in the face like wine? A named thing can survive on this earth and take refuge in it. A named thing exists, existed, lives.
          “Now take these,” Hattie told me, placing an apple in each palm, “and set them aside. Make sure they last. They’re especially good.”
 





--
Benjamin Kessler's work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Entropy, The Oakland Review, Epigraph, Superstition Review, The Masters Review, The Gravity of the Thing, What are Birds?, and Portland Review. "To Be Born" is an excerpt from his second novel, currently in progress. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

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  • Home
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022