by Helen Raica-Klotz
- The white walls, smooth underneath your fingers, where your palms flatten and then push each time the pain hits, your body collapsing as you struggle to stay upright.
- The fluorescent lighting.
- The cassette player, with the mix tape of James Taylor, George Winston, and Billy Joel that plays for twenty minutes before you mutter to shut that thing off, right the fuck now. It sits silently in the corner of the room.
- The smell of the chickpea salad sandwich on your husband’s breath while he tells you to breathe, just breathe, as your throat and mouth fill with bile.
- The vomit, splattering over the black and white linoleum floor.
- The ice crunching beneath your teeth.
- The nurses’ fingers, so many fingers you lose count, pushing into and inside of you.
- The pain, which is not on a numerical scale. It is only color: blue-black, hot red, and blinding white.
- The monitor. Its gray pixels form the shape of a hill, then a mountain, then a cliff face. Your husband watches it intently. Look at me, you think, but you can’t speak. No words. You reach out and shove the monitor from the bed. It crashes to the floor, a pleasing sound of metal and plastic. The monitor is taken away.
- The clock, white with black hands that sweep over its face in an erratic dance. It has no meaning. Time is only measured in moments where there is pain, or the pain is waiting to arrive.
- The metal rails of the bed.
- The blue gown, drenched with sweat, stuck to your back.
- The pain, which knows no language. It is predatory, voracious, and more cunning than you.
- The room, with its crumpled bed sheets and your husband’s worried eyes. Like a house of mirrors, these things appear, then disappear, then reappear again.
- One window, venetian blinds drawn and closed.
- More nurses, or perhaps the same one. You have lost the capacity for counting or for civility. You look at the ceiling and spread your legs.
- The pain, a wave that keeps coming and receding. You are not a good swimmer. You are drowning.
- The words, “19 hours,” “time to give you some help,” and “epidural.”
- The needle, a warm push in the small of your back. The heat spreads like a rose throughout your torso, your legs, and your hands. It feels like shame.
- The relief. You take deep breaths as the pain moves down a long corridor, getting dimmer as it inches further away. Soon, you discover this is just another trick of the light.
- The IV tube snaking into your pale flesh.
- The grunting sounds of a caged animal. It is you. Your teeth are clenched. Your hair spills into your face. You push, and push, and push. The room blurs and spins.
- The laugher. “It’s a boy,” you hear. You are floating, impossibly light. You close your eyes. There is a weight on your breasts.
- The baby, so impossibly small: wisps of hair, round mouth, flattened nose. His eyes are dark brown, the color of crushed plums, hot chocolate, the dirt from your grandpa’s garden where the raspberries grow. These eyes are looking directly at you.
- The love.
- The fear.
- The heart, your heart. You feel it expand as these two emotions collide into this unknown space inside your chest. You can’t swallow, you can’t breathe, you can’t look away. “I can’t,” you whisper.
But you will.
Helen Raica-Klotz is the winner of the 2025 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook contest for Superior Stories, a collection of short fiction. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The MacGuffin, The Great Lakes Review, and MER; two of her nonfiction essays were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2026. Helen teaches composition courses at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan. She’s also taught writing at a regional prison, a homeless shelter, an alternative high school, and other places where she can find people with stories to tell. Learn more at www.raicaklotz.com.
January House Literary Journal 
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