This story is by Jennifer Jaxxon-Louis and was part of our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
Emily can’t face herself knowing what she’s about to do. Clamping her eyes shut, she avoids the mirror as she brushes her teeth, scrubs her face, and twists her golden curls into a bun.
She walks into her bedroom. The framed picture of her first solo performance as the Fairy Godmother in the Harkford City Ballet’s spring production of Cinderella is hung over her dresser. Patting her slightly swollen stomach, Emily laments that she’ll never get to feel her baby kick, but she’s always known dance requires great sacrifice.
“It’s not the right time,” she reminds herself. She’s worked her entire life to become a principal dancer for a major ballet company, and now she has a real shot. But not with a baby bump in the way. And her husband Jake just started his judicial clerkship and doesn’t even want kids. She hardly desires to obliterate her dancing dreams and her marriage just because her birth control failed.
Eyeing the clock, Emily rushes to get ready. Her appointment at the abortion clinic on the corner Sycamore Avenue and Fourth Street is in twenty-five minutes.
Emily jumps into her Subaru and weaves around others trying to beat each light, anxious to get there before she loses her nerve.
As she turns onto Fourth Street, Jake calls. “How are you?”
Emily musters a voice of nonchalance like she’s lunching with a friend. “Fine. Good. You?”
“Okay. Headed there now. I’m on Sycamore and – oh, um, sorry. Call you back.”
Just then, Emily’s car jerks sideways and she hears an awful rum-pum-pum, rum-pum-pum from the right front. Slamming on her brakes, she pulls off to the shoulder, her rim scraping against the concrete. “Dammit!” Getting out, she runs around to inspect her flat, finding a nail in it. “Lovely.”
Emily eyes the trunk, unsure if she has a spare. She doesn’t know how to change it even if she did. She tries to dial Jake only to see her phone is dead. She can’t summon her husband or roadside service for help. Ducking into her car hoping to find her charging cable, she remembers lending it to Jake last night. “Ah shoot!”
Emily attempts to wave someone down, but no one stops. She spots a convenience store up the street and sprints toward it, praying that they sell charging cables, or better yet, that someone will come to help her.
Barreling through the door, Emily sees a clerk stocking a rack of cell phone accessories and her heart soars.
“Excuse me,” she says, squeezing past a tall man in a dark coat.
He grabs her and clamps an arm around her neck, pressing a gun to her temple as the cashier’s mouth drops open and his hands go up. “Gimme that cash quick or I blow her brains out.”
###
Jake sits at a red light talking to his wife on the phone when a little girl wanders past, a Disney princess balloon bobbing behind her. She looks just like Emily’s pictures from when she was a toddler, with the same golden curls and wide blue eyes. All alone, the girl waddles down the busy sidewalk dangerously close to the curb, but no one seems to notice. Jake tells Emily he’ll call her back and darts out of his car toward the child who is about to wander into traffic.
Before he can get her, a man lunges through a crowd of ladies with sunbrellas. “Maddy! Sweetie! Don’t wander off like that!”
The little girl turns and bursts into tears, releasing her balloon which the wind steals.
The man scoops her into a hug and twirls her around until she giggles. He hoists her onto his shoulders and walks away.
Jake watches the girl with his wife’s curls bob above the sidewalk crowd reaching for her drifting balloon and wonders if that’s what their child might look like. Or perhaps his straight dark hair would dominate.
A pang stabs his heart. He reminds himself of his prestigious clerkship where he works at least eighty hours a week and all his judicial aspirations, and especially his reservations about being a parent because of his abusive childhood. Suddenly, none of it matters. Jake realizes he wants Emily to have their child even if the timing is terrible.
Hurrying back to his car, Jake dials his wife. She doesn’t answer. He calls and texts a few times. No response. He gulps. Has the abortion already started?
Jake’s heart nearly explodes through his chest as he races his Honda down Sycamore, desperate to get to Emily. As he approaches the next light, a green car makes an illegal turn, and several vehicles crash, including a big camper that tips and skids, blocking the entire intersection.
Cursing, Jake swerves to the side and drives over the sidewalk toward a parking garage, hoping to exit onto another street. Entering, he charges up the incline, looking for the way out. As he rounds a corner, a junker car backs up right in his way.
While Jake waits with a foot hovering over the accelerator, the rusted car bursts into flames.
###
Emily feels the gun and her first reaction is to scream that she’s pregnant.
The gunman chokes Emily tighter. “Get the cash from the safe too. Make it quick or this bitch and her baby die.”
Panic blinds Emily. She is keenly aware that her worry is not for herself but for her baby – the same one she was just on her way to kill.
A security guard emerges from the back with his gun drawn. “Take it easy,” he says. “Just put your —”
“Another step and she’s dead,” the gunman snarls, putting the gun barrel under Emily’s chin and pulling her backward.
Something pushes Emily from behind and she flies into a rack of chips, landing hard on her stomach. “Oh God!” Clutching her abdomen, she turns to find the gunman flat on his back holding his head as a can of SpaghettiO’s rolls by.
The store clerk squats to grab the gun, then turns to hold it on him. “Cans make great weapons too, asshole!”
The guard slaps cuffs on the gunman as the clerk helps Emily up, asking if she’s okay.
Emily looks down to see blood on the hem of her shirt. Worry besieges her, and she reminds herself of her plans to end her baby’s life. Shame reddens her cheeks, and she knows she cannot abort her child even if it means losing her husband and her dreams of becoming a principal dancer.
Another customer approaches with a phone to her ear. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
Emily nods and hugs the clerk with tears streaming down her cheeks, then asks to borrow the woman’s phone. With shaky fingers, Emily texts her husband.
###
Jake gets to the car that’s on fire and discovers a woman inside. She screams something he can’t hear as she struggles over her voluminous belly to open the door. Jake realizes she’s very pregnant as he yanks on the handle. It comes off in his hand.
She rolls down the window a bit. “Get me out of here!” she begs, coughing from the thick smoke pouring into the car. “My water just broke!”
The window is only cracked a few inches. “Open it more,” Jake shouts.
She tries, but the glass doesn’t move. “It’s stuck!”
Jake races back to his trunk and grabs the tire jack. Returning, he instructs the woman to duck, and he breaks her window. Clearing away shards with his sleeve, he reaches in and pulls her through right as the inner cab ignites.
“Whew, that was close!” she says as he drags her behind an SUV away from the smoke. Sinking to her knees, she gets onto her back and spreads her legs, exhaling rhythmically as her shoulders bob. “I think he’s coming!”
Jake considers the woman before him whose baby needs him. But his baby needs him too.
He whips out his phone and dials 9-1-1. “I’m sorry,” he says, then runs off while telling the dispatcher the woman’s location.
“You’re leaving me like this?” the woman calls after him.
“Sorry!” Jake shouts. “Paramedics will be there soon.”
“Asshole!”
Jake exits the garage, then continues down Sycamore toward the abortion clinic, feeling awful for leaving the woman and praying the ambulance arrives in time. He finally gets to the corner of Sycamore and Fourth and stops, leaning against a tree to catch his breath as he eyes the abortion clinic. His phone vibrates in his pocket.
Jake takes it out and reads Emily’s text. A smile spreads across his face. She’s heading to the ER to save their baby. Turning back to the parking garage, Jake rushes to save the woman’s baby, marveling at the turn of the day’s events.
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