by Dina Silver
Two and a half minutes passed.
My lungs were contracting so I walked back to the kitchen, but sadly the air in there wasn’t any better, and my socks were wet. I glanced at the clock on the microwave. Three minutes had passed.
I don’t recall ever walking back into the bathroom…only sitting on the toilet staring at the stick on the edge of my sink. My shoulders slumped and heavy, keeping me from lifting my neck and properly viewing the window. I leaned forward, grabbed the stick tentatively like a shard of glass, and just as I brought it toward me, two bright pink lines appeared in the results window.
“Holy shit,” I said aloud.
I held the little test stick, which now seemed so technologically un-advanced, that I could hardly believe something so disposable was capable of delivering such life-altering information. But there they were, two gleaming, fuchsia lines, and neither one were remotely pale in color or incomplete. I placed it back on the sink and buried my head in my hands, because as if seeing those neon stripes staring back at me wasn’t bad enough, next came the realization of who the father was.
The slowest three minutes of my life were then followed by the passing of two hours in the blink of an eye. I sat on the floor, catatonic in front of my books until after midnight when I took my phone off the hook and went to bed.
Two Tylenol PM’s and a Bud Light were all it took to get me to sleep.
