*All accounts in this anthology are fictional
Dahomey
I went to bed early that night. The acid reflux was too much for my body to bear. This pregnancy had taken a toll on what I understood as the happiest time of my life. Even at that, we loved our unborn child.
“Dahomey…are you sure you don’t want to know the sex of the baby?” Aahil said to me as I walked up the stairs to go lay down.
“I am sure,” I smiled, “Aahil we are the year 2027, the sex of our baby doesn’t matter, as long as they are healthy. Besides, if we know the sex, we will adhere to gender norms without even realizing it. We are going to wait until they are born.”
Aahil smirked my way and headed towards the living room to watch some television after his long shift at the hospital that day. He was a well-respected pediatrician in our town, and I knew he was going to make an even better father.
Aahil and I met when we were twenty-five. I was finishing my graduate degree in psychology and he was starting the final stages of his medical degree. Even in the twenty-first century, our love was considered taboo, an immigrant Muslim man and a black woman were not exactly what our little American town was expecting. It took my father years to be able to establish a line of respect for the colour of his skin, now I was adding another controversy into our life, but that is what made it all the more fun.
We both understood that starting a life together was going to have its challenges, even though it should not have. As much as society has progressed throughout the years, the white American concepts still interrupted our everyday life; but all of that did not matter anymore. We were planning on having a child, and that was the greatest gift that we could have been given.
I was lying in our bed, listening to the echo of the television through the vent in our bedroom. When we first moved into this home the echo used to scrape every nerve in my body, but as time progressed, I got used to it. Knowing that Aahil’s time to watch television was what he needed to calm himself after the stress he experienced each day. That day was especially stressful, he had lost a patient, a young child whose brain tumour surgery did not go as planned. He was not in charge of the surgery itself, but he oversaw the medical procedures prior to it. He did not talk about it, and I did not pressure him to either, but I knew that it bothered him. The parents had threatened to release a complaint against him, for being negligent, I knew it had more to do with the colour of his skin, not about his doctorial practices. It was a stress we didn’t talk about that night, as much as he ignored it, I could see the pain flooding through his dark eyes, and my heart hurt for him, but he needed his space and I respected that.
—
I awoke to the train passing by our block, then an intense knock on the door. I heard the door fling open and the house becoming destroyed from the inside out. I could hear expensive china crashing on the floor and pounds being made on the walls.
I ran downstairs in nothing but my white nightdress and my hair wrap, holding my stomach in pure fear. When I got to the end of the stairs, I saw Federal agents tackling my fiancé to the floor, grabbing him by his hair and pulling up towards our front door.
“What is happening?” I yelled, in frustration and heart wrenching panic.
“We have been ordered to collect Aahil, your safety is in our hands.”
“My safety! This is the father of my child!”
I ran towards the front door, watching Aahil cling to the border, I could see the dread in his dark eyes, the sadness, the confusion, the complete astonishment in the life that was now our reality. He was not strong enough, the two men pulled him from the door and dragged him towards their vehicles. I followed to the front step of the house that we had built together.
I stood there in shock. Later the neighbours said my cries were unbearably sad, they could hear the ache in my voice, but I did not remember.
I felt pain in my lower abdomen, but tried to ignore it, the stress was upsetting the baby. I continued to yell in dismay at the officers that were tearing our family apart. Another pain stabbed my uterus and I felt dampness, I looked down to see blood seeping through my nightdress. I was overwhelmed with panic and tension, I looked into Aahil’s eyes when the officers turned him around in the car and collapsed on the concrete, only remembering the smell of the peonies that welcomed the guests into our home.
I came to in what seemed to be days, hoping it was a dream, but knowing the dread I felt was anything but.
“Dahomey Moore”
I looked up to see a nurse standing at the side of the hospital bed, in the very room I was supposed to be in for the birth of our child in four months. I knew what she was going to say. I no longer felt the baby inside of me, but felt empty, alone and deserted. My eyes swelled with tears.
“It’s gone.” I whispered to her; she shook her head.
“We tried our best, but there was too much damage, your baby boy did not make it.”
“My baby boy” I murmured to myself, “it was a baby boy.”
The nurse left the paperwork on the side table, understanding that I was not in the shape to fill it in right away.
A brush of fatigue came over me, I rolled over on my side, pulling the blankets in close and holding them tightly. I initially wanted to put blame on myself, on my body for not doing its duty as a woman and caring for the child that lived inside of me. But the tears that began to flood were not tears of negativity towards myself, but anger towards the people that took my life away.
Federal agents took my partner, and in retrospect took my child. Had my body not gone through the stress that it had, maybe my baby would still be growing inside me, instead, I was discharged from the hospital to go to an empty home. A home that housed an immigrant whose papers were reversed, discredited for their authenticity, and therefore, the man in which they belonged to was deported back to a country that he only remembered as a child. Never to be seen or heard from again. His last memory of his home was his partner, covered in blood, unconscious at the front step, while he was being pushed into the back of a tinted windowed SUV. As these thoughts flooded my brain, I could feel the pain in my chest, I put my hand on my heart and felt it break for the millionth time. Shattering in more pieces, fragments I knew I would have to pick up, but I sat on the front step of the house, not sure if I was ready to go back in, completely alone.