“It’s a girl I can tell, we’ve had nothing but trouble”
They had only just found out a few months before.
The mother was happy, if apprehensive.
The father was accepting.
And I remember him saying to me
with the mother out of earshot:
“it’s a girl I can tell, we’ve had nothing but trouble.”
And I thought to myself what kind of trouble
can a tiny blob in a belly make?
He gave me that if you only knew face
that parents of children give to those without children.
Then the mother called him over and he
put his hand over her belly as though he were
trying to keep something from escaping.
I smiled to the mother who really did have
a strange glow about her.
About the Author: Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many mounds of snow. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Cultural Weekly, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
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Image Credit: Jacob Byerly “Family Portrait” (1855) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
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