The Red Poetry

"People call blood a loss. I call it a language—every drop spelling out the truth they never wanted written."

The pain was extraordinary. Not because it hurt—though it did—but because it was mine. I'd chosen it. After years of pain chosen for me, inflicted on me, growing inside me without permission, this was mine mine mine. The blood was warm, warmer than tears, warmer than the amniotic fluid that had cushioned the thing inside me. It ran over my fingers like ink, like I was finally writing the poem I'd been composing since I was seven.

For a moment, perfect silence. Even the machines held their breath.

Then Noah screamed, and time shattered into fragments.

He was leaping forward— He was frozen in place— He was eight years old finding a dead bird— He was pressing the emergency button— He was in the temple making promises about eternal families— He was screaming my name but it sounded like "Mother"—

The alarm shrieked and I laughed, or maybe I screamed, or maybe both sounds were the same sound just at different frequencies. My voice finally free, finally telling the truth: This is what it feels like. This is what you never asked about. This is what happens when you plant seeds in unwilling soil.

Margaret materialised—had she always been there? Had she been there when I was seven? Sometimes I thought all nurses were the same nurse, the eternal witness to women's pain. Her mouth opened: "Oh my God! CODE RED! CODE RED! OBSTETRIC EMERGENCY! THEATRE NOW!"

The words fragmented in the air:

CODE (secret)

RED (blood)

OBSTETRIC (forced birth)

EMERGENCY (fifteen years too late)

THEATRE (performance)

NOW (but also then, but also always)

The room exploded into bodies. Three nurses, four, ten, a hundred. They multiplied like the hands in my nightmares, reaching, grabbing, pressing. Someone's hands on my wound—no, stop touching me, I'd finally opened myself, don't close me up again. Someone preparing a needle—no, no more things entering my body without permission. The blonde doctor shouting. The grey consultant looking at my masterpiece with professional disgust.

"Severe haemorrhage!"

"Get four units of O-neg, stat!"

"Call theatre, tell them we're coming NOW!"

"Where's the anaesthetist?"

"Someone get paeds down here!"

Their words were a medical poem, each line ending with urgency, but I was writing a different verse on the white sheets. The blood spread in patterns that looked like words in a language only I could read. It said: Finally. It said: Freedom. It said: This is what rejection looks like when it stops being silent.

I could see Noah through the forest of medical staff. His face was white-green like old paper, like the marriage certificate we'd signed, like the colour I'd turned when the pregnancy test was positive. He was dissolving at the edges, becoming transparent. I could see through him to the boy he'd been, thinking marriage would be simple, thinking babies were blessings, thinking love could fix what was broken before he ever met me.

"We're losing her!" the blonde doctor shouted, and I wanted to tell him: You lost me years ago. I've been lost since I was seven. This is me being found.

They transferred me to a gurney. Hands everywhere—under my back, my legs, my head. Too many hands. Always too many hands. I was seven again, trying to make myself small enough to disappear, but also I was twenty-two and taking up space with my blood, marking territory, claiming ground.

The glass shard was still in my hand. My fingers had locked around it like rigor mortis, like I'd died holding it, like it was my child instead of the thing inside me. Someone was trying to pry my fingers open but I held on. This was mine. This glass was the only honest thing in my life—it cut, it drew blood, it didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was.

"Out of the way!" The grey consultant shoved Noah against the wall. Good. Stay there. Stay away from what I've done, what I've become, what I've always been underneath the performance of wife and mother.

We were moving. The ceiling tiles blurred past like pages in a book being rifled through. Chapter One: The Girl Who Learned Silence. Chapter Two: The Girl Who Learned to Pretend. Chapter Three: The Woman Who Stopped Pretending. The fluorescent lights were suns rising and setting too fast, days compressed into seconds, years into moments.

I was leaving a trail. Blood on the floor like breadcrumbs, like the fairy tale, but I wasn't trying to find my way home. I was making sure I could never go back. Each drop was a word in my real autobiography, the one written in DNA and haemoglobin instead of lies and silences.

The young nurse was crying as she ran alongside the gurney. Her tears mixed with my blood on her gloves—salt and iron, grief and freedom. She understood something. Maybe she had her own dark room, her own weight, her own thing growing inside that she wanted to cut out.

"Thirty-four weeks," someone was saying. "Viable. The baby could survive."

The baby. They kept calling it that. Not "the thing." Not "the weight." Not "the violation." The baby, like it was innocent, like it hadn't been feeding on me, using me, growing from my unwillingness. Like conception was always immaculate instead of sometimes being the opposite.

Time kept folding. I was being wheeled down this corridor but also I was in my childhood bed hearing footsteps in the hall. I was bleeding out but also I was seven years old holding my breath, playing dead, hoping if I was still enough I would become invisible. The gurney's wheels squeaked in rhythm with those long-ago footsteps: step-squeak-step-squeak-closer-closer-closer.

"Heather, stay with us!" Someone was shouting but "us" was a concept I didn't understand. There had never been an "us." There had been me and the things done to me. Me and the roles forced upon me. Me and the thing growing inside me. But never "us."

The operating theatre doors approached like a mouth opening to swallow me. Red lights, white walls, the smell of antiseptic trying to cover the smell of blood but blood always wins. Blood tells the truth. Blood doesn't lie about love or family or natural processes.

They were moving faster now, urgent, desperate to save what I was trying to destroy. My hand was opening—no, someone was forcing it open, finger by finger. The glass fell away and I felt naked without it, disarmed, vulnerable again. But the damage was done. I'd written my poem on my body. I'd finally said no in a language that couldn't be misheard.

"She's conscious," someone said, surprised, as if consciousness was binary, as if I hadn't been conscious and unconscious simultaneously since I was seven, as if dissociation wasn't my first language.

The lights in the theatre were brilliant white, holy, burning. They reminded me of the nightlight in my childhood room—the one that was supposed to keep monsters away but only lit them up better, made their shadows longer, made it easier for them to find me.

More hands. Transferring me to the operating table. Someone was cutting the gown away from me, except it kept turning back into the dress as they worked—the child's dress, the one that was forever being taken off me by hands that weren't mine—and good, I never wanted to wear it again anyway, gown or dress or whatever it became between one breath and the next. Never wanted to wear anything that marked me as female, as mother, as available for use. The air was cold on my skin but the blood was still warm, still flowing, still writing its honesty.

"We need to get her under NOW," someone said, and I saw the mask approaching like a hand over my mouth, like history repeating, like—