Still, I wonder by Quade Hermann

      Dan Finnen CC




Still, I wonder.
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The locked door, the shiny glass eye of the security camera, the disembodied voice. “Welcome to Everywoman’s Health Centre. Name?”
The ugly hiss of voices behind the police barrier. “Your baby has a heartbeat already. And eyes. And toes.” 
The thud of my heartbeat as the lock clicks and I pull the heavy door open.  

Inside is bright and clinical. A row of silent women and one man in the waiting room. The woman and the man both staring at the floor, his hand on hers, matching gold wedding bands. Three young women fidgeting and scrolling on their phones. An older one gnawing on her fingernail and reading a celebrity magazine. She must have brought it with her; every surface is covered with pastel-coloured pamphlets about contraception and sexual health. 

The nurse smiles gently and hands me a clipboard. “Fill out this form and then one of the counsellors will see you.” There’s a bowl of rainbow-coloured condoms beside her, like spermicidal party favours. 

Date of last period. 
Date of last sexual activity. 
Number of sexual partners. 

My boyfriend is at home playing video games and waiting for the call to come and pick me up. We fought last night and the night before that. He has a lot of opinions but no job and no money and no particular ambitions. I had to borrow from a friend just to be here. 

I fill out the forms as the protestors’ chanting filters through the shatterproof windows, a whisper in my ears. Day after day I have been waiting for some whisper from my body, some definitive twitch. A sign that this tiny thing inside me is bigger than all the other things put together: the shock, the rent, the boyfriend I don’t like all that much, the self-doubt. I have waited until the last safe moment but there has been only silence. A sign in itself, I finally decide. 

Inside the cubicle the counselor is kind and practiced. “How are you feeling about the pregnancy? Have you told the father? Your family?” 
She flips through line drawings of fetal development, a woman’s body sliced sideways like a ripe fruit with layers and layers around a single growing seed. She studies my face for questions or signs of doubt. “You can leave at any time,” she says. “You can stop the procedure right up until the moment we begin.” I nod and nod and nod, waiting for the one question that never comes: do you want to be a mother? 

I was 12. There had been fevered discussions in the locker room. Rumours of something to come. One-by-one the girls had started standing apart, at new angles, arms crossed with self-consciousness. My mother explained it all: the change, the blood, the cross to bear, the new danger. I howled in disbelief at the injustice of it all. She stopped and stared, puzzled. “Don’t you want to be a mother?” I knew what the answer was supposed to be, but I couldn’t give it. 

I phoned her last night. She knew better than to try to argue me into keeping it. 
“But couldn’t you go through with it and give it up for adoption?” 
I could hear the slur in her words. 
“I don’t think I could have a baby and then give it away to strangers. I’d spend my whole life wondering.”
“It’s hard,” she said. “But not impossible.” A long silence, the tinkle of ice on glass. 
“I couldn’t do it. I can’t,” I said.
“Well, you’re lucky then. It’s not like it was. You won’t have to hide. Or wear a scarlet letter.” 
The line went dead; she’d hung up on me. 

Years later, after she died, I got a phone call out of the blue. My half-sister, born years and years before me, when my mother was just 14. Turns out there was a boy too, born when she was 16. We’re still looking for him.  

After the procedure the nurse asks me if I want to see. She helps me off the table and over to a microscope with a Petri dish. The floor is cold under my feet, the machines are humming, there’s the smell of antiseptic, and the feel of the nurse’s steadying hand on my back. I bend to the microscope and stare at a small gelatinous blob of pink tissue with a tiny dark spot at its center, like the eye of a passing hurricane. I feel faint with relief. But it won’t save me.  
Still, I wonder.

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Quade Hermann (@quade_writes) has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she was an associate editor of Prism International. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in Diviners, Roots Literary Journal, Literary Cocktail Magazine, Mix Magazine, THIS Magazine, Geist, Utne Reader, Alternatives Journal, and Hot and Bothered, an anthology from Arsenal Pulp Press. She was shortlisted for the 2023 anthology Keeping It Under Wraps: Bodies Uncensored. Once a CBC/Radio-Canada producer, she’s now a communications specialist in Switzerland and volunteers for the Geneva Writers’ Group.

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