Push
by Chris Powici
Eighty-five through the docks, foot hard down, my beautiful Mercedes shaking like an old can, and Irene in the back seat screaming Faster, faster, when, for a second, in the middle of the windscreen, a white gull rises in the sea-light over the harbour.
Then the screaming returns. Jake you bastard, hurry, it's coming and I'm screaming hold on you fat cow we're nearly there. Because we are. And because ever since school I have called her fat cow, as she has called me pig-brain rat-breath mouse-prick, which has always been Irene's way with a hostile world, including The King Alfred Hospital where we arrive with seconds to spare, and where several nurses and a thin woman doctor with a thick Yorkshire accent gather around her — blankets, towels, syringes — and Irene still swearing and cursing until you start to wonder how many God-Shits and Christ-Fucks it takes to push out a baby.
And now I'm staring at this helpless, howling girl, out-screaming Irene and filling the room, the hospital and the whole damn city with its soul-burning yell, a fat Southampton miracle of blood and noise, and not mine but that grinning idiot Gabriel Lumley's terrible, perfect child.
Chris Powici lives in Perthshire, Scotland. His poetry has appeared in all manner of magazines and journals and he has been awarded a New Writers Bursary by the Scottish Arts Council. He teaches English Literature and creative writing for the University of Stirling and The Open University. "Push" is a rare and, for the writer at least, pleasurable foray into short fiction.