1st Person – The Mouse Den

“The Open Window”

I see her now, playing with her girls in her yard next door. The last two and a half years seems like it has gone by so fast, but I remember a time in the past when time didn’t go by quick enough.

I was just fixing to enter the seventh grade in the heat of August when they moved in next door. The four of them drove up: two in the moving van and two in a late model four door Chevrolet. The two parents were average in appearance and by no means Ozzie and Harriet. The older of the two children, although neither of the two would have been called a child, was a tall guy probably eighteen or older. The other was his sister, a brunette, small in stature, but as anyone could see, blossoming quite nicely. She was no more than fifteen, or at least she would appear to have been fifteen; that was what I thought fifteen year old girls were supposed to look like anyway. It was several months before I discovered she was still only fourteen, which made her ripely blooming figure even more remarkable.

“Mandy Delivers”

Mandy Delivers
by Fully-Dilated

My floral sundress tangles around my legs as I move around in the bed, trying to find a comfortable position to ride out the contraction. “Mmmmmm… ahhhhh… mmmmm…. ahhhhh….” I breathe steadily, propping myself up on several pillows so that I’m half-sitting, my uterus contracting firmly. “Ahhhhhh…” I breathe the last twinges of the contraction out, relaxing back into the pillows and reaching for my stopwatch.

Ten minutes, twenty-one seconds.

Frustrated, I toss it back onto the bed and try to relax enough to doze. I’ve been having steady contractions for nearly twenty-seven hours now, but I’m stalled out at the ten minute mark, my labor refusing to progress. I’ve tried standing, sitting, walking and squatting, but now I’m too tired to do more than lie back and let the contractions wash over me.

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“Cruise”

Cruise
by Fully-Dilated

“Women in my family have a history of going overdue,” I warn the midwife at my ﬁrst ofﬁcial appointment, hoping she’s not the type to pressure me into tons of interventions if I go a day over forty weeks.

“No worries Mandy,” she chuckles, patting me on the knee, “As long as your blood pressure is good and the baby’s heartbeat is regular, you can be pregnant just as long as you want. Forty weeks, forty-ﬁve…”

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