Word Count: 370
I no longer can bend from my waist to pick a dropped spoon off the floor. My feet are swollen into sandals. My boobs for the first time form into cleavage but even the most lascivious of men feels it rude to look anywhere but into my eyes or toss a casual glance at my belly. It was not supposed to be like this.
I don’t glow though I’m puffy round like the sun. This pregnancy is nothing I wanted, nothing I’d planned, not a conception of love. Not even of lust I am told. Rape’s desire is control. Rape bypasses foreplay and lubrication. Rape hurts a whole helluva lot.
Friday night happy hour was a regular thing for a few of us at the office and McGregor’s was our place to meet. We stuck to ourselves and yet the same faces from other offices became familiar to each other as well. Soon we were saying hello to people we knew only from sloshing down two drinks in an hour at half price. Soon we were mingling. Soon I was leaving with someone I didn’t know I didn’t know at all.
This baby inside me is his. After that night I never saw him again. Did I report the rape? No. Happy hour comes with its own set of rules. And I guess I was wrong about him looking familiar. Bloody Marys made me think that he had.
The law holds abortion illegal. Though in rape you have one day to decide to opt out with the morning-after pill. There are no week-after pills. Or month-after pills. When you’ve had time to get your head stitched back on. No, there are nine pregnant months and a baby.
I’ve lost my job and my insurance. I’ve lost most of my friends. I can recover, make it on my own, but not with a baby.
Someone has told me about a man in the west end of the city. Word is he once was a pediatrician, a surgeon. He’s more expensive, they say, but much better and safer than the butcher my friend Amanda went to, who works his own “happy hour” down at the end of the street.
