"It's a stillborn," the doctor says, mopping his brows with a spotted kerchief. "I'm sorry." And he genuinely does seem so.
We would not look at each other. Instead, we fixed our eyes at the mass of bloody flesh in my hands, in our hands. I am looking at it with all my remaining energy, as if I could electric-shock it into living and pulsing again, as if we did not feel the wet coldness seeping through our fingers. It is stiff already, our dead love, rotting and decaying away in our hands until it finally disintegrates. Now it is just my hand in his, the drying blood the sole indication that we had any love between us at all.
At night we sleep together one last time, his knees fitting in the back of mine and his chest cushioning my back. We are both trembling and sobbing quietly, because we know, know with absolute and uncanny certainty that a single escaped cry would break us down and tear us apart. My hair is soaked with his tears.
It is no use trying again. How many loves have we revived only to lose them in the end? How many times have I felt the doctor's shiny scalpel slit through the thin skin of my chest, only to remove my gasping love, deformed and grotesque, as it is? How many times have he dug the graves to bury our loves?
No more.
No more.
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