Who Doesn't Like the Morphine?

The drug washed over me like a truck.What did you just give me, I asked from under it. Morphine, the anesthesiologist called down from the driver’s seat.

The baby was just born that minute, dangling – steamy, bloody – from the hands of the tired attending, somewhere across the room, beyond the flip side of the blue crinkly all-purpose all-weather synthesis of all the best efforts of product design to shield me from my own body, with the sad side effect of shielding me from everything else too, so I could see nothing but the blue underside of a truck. I could only hear the baby say, I’ve been born, as babies do, with a waah. I waahed in turn, relieved to hear his humanness after months of deepsea silence, spouting a quick spray of joy into the fucked-up fluorescence, and an urgent Is he okay Is he okay.

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