REPLACEMENT RATE
REPLACEMENT RATE
by Robert Beveridge
The birth was uneventful. The Junior Nurse swaddled the Child, laid him on the Mother’s sweaty breast. The new Mother struggled to stay awake. An uneventful birth does not mean an easy one. But she fought exhaustion, cradled her new Child, cooed to him as the nurses kicked the brakes on the bed, pushed her from the delivery room. A few turns and down the hall to the elevator. Others they passed stopped, complimented the new Mother. She was too tired to do anything but smile back. Her appreciation was, however, obvious in her smile.
The nurses both looked down at her with their own smiles, both remembering their own firstborns, their own nurses, their own times making this same journey. All was right with the world once again.
The elevator came, and the four journeyed from the third floor to the basement. The bell dinged, and off they went, out the elevator car, a right turn, then down the longest hallway the hospital had, into the Feeding Room.
Everything had been so smooth that the nurses, the Mother, and the Child arrived earlier than expected. The Father was flensed, the bucket was full, but the orderlies were still in the process of dismembering the body. The Lead Orderly’s head jerked up as the door opened, and he began a litany of apologies to the Senior Nurse. No, no, that’s all right, she said, her smile still as genuine as it was before. We’re running early. You can go on about your business as if we’re not here. She and the Junior Nurse then moved the bed into position on the other side of the long table that separated the Mother area from the Father area.
The Junior Nurse scanned the walls. Gouts of blood had splashed onto them, and small bits of meat flung by the bone saws had slapped themselves there, some stuck fast, some on a slow journey to the floor, leaving a trail behind them. Most of the time the orderlies had finished their tasks and cleaned before the Mother arrived. Not so today, but she had no qualms about this; it is, after all, good for people to be reminded of where they came from now and again. Don’t want people growing up thinking meat comes from Styrofoam trays, do we?
The Lead Orderly finished packing the Father into the usual buckets, and the rest of the orderlies cleaned the room with an efficiency that the Senior Nurse, even after all these years, found somewhat preternatural. One gets good at a job, to be sure, but these folks seemed as if they’d been born to do this work. Born with rags and spray bottles in their hands, angles and distances in their minds, the perfect formulae for cleaning blood and bone fragments already a part of their makeup.
In no time, it was over, and the ritual was ready to begin. The Senior Nurse picked up the baby’s bottle on the long table between the Mother are and the Father area. The Junior Nurse picked up the nipple assembly at the same time and put it in the sterilizer, pressed the button. Thirty seconds of steam and it would be ready to go. Just the amount of time the Senior Nurse needed. She picked up the small ladle next to the sterilizer and ladled scoop of spring water into the bottle, then walked around the table and added two ladles from the bucket that had, before, been below the Father’s body. As she walked back around the table, the sterilizer made its popping noise. The Senior Nurse pulled out the nipple, tested to make sure the rubber wasn’t too hot, and affixed it to the bottle. She moved, as if by instinct, to feed the child, but caught herself before she could commit such a heresy and handed the bottle to the new Mother. The Mother looked up at the Senior Nurse and smiled in gratitude, as if she knew what had transpired behind the Senior Nurse’s eyes, then turned her attention back to the Child. She nudged the Child’s upper lip with the rubber. The child latched on and began to suck. Beaming, the new Mother drifted into sleep, the suckling Child still in her arms.
Fiction © Copyright Robert Beveridge
Image by dife88 from Pixabay
