I wrote a short story related to the new idea I have for my novel. I haven't written a short story in a really long time.

Title: Strange Birth

I didn’t notice anything strange in the delivery that day. The mother who had been trying to give birth for a number of years had finally gotten pregnant. She had been a patient of mine for several years, and I knew how long she and her husband had struggled to conceive. When she told me she was going to have a child, I was elated.

I knew how much this child meant to her, so we had followed all the rules, had taken all the tests, and her pregnancy progressed without any problems. When the day came and I got the call that morning she was coming to the hospital, I was relieved. The big event had come and all the parents’ anguish was going to be over. My patient was going to deliver by all signs a healthy child. This was why I had become a doctor and specialized in deliveries, and I remember feeling proud that day.

The mother had decided to give birth naturally, as was the preference of most women these days since it was healthier for the baby and mother. I ate a large breakfast knowing that I might be at the hospital for the rest of the day and night, since first time mothers often took a long time to give birth.But as soon as I arrived at the hospital, the nurse told me that my patient had already gone into labor and her contractions indicated that the birth could happen in an hour. I was a little surprised at the time, but there nothing that would have set off any alarms. It was hard to tell with first time time mothers. Some took a long time and some delivered really quickly. You don’t have anything to base the experience on because it is their first delivery.

So I prepared myself and entered the birthing room. The mother was there and when she saw me she smiled weakly at me. I saw weariness in her eyes, and I knew that although the delivery was going quickly my patient was already exhausted. “It won’t be long now.” I told her as I came over and patted her hand. I looked at my patient’s husband who was holding her hand. He nodded at me, but like most first time dads I could see in his eyes that he was overwhelmed. No matter how much they try to prepare you for the birth, nothing compares to watching it in person. “Is she going to be alright doctor?”, he whispered to me. People always want to whisper when they are in the birthing room, which is odd to me.

In a normal voice I tell him “She’ll be fine and we are lucky since by all signs it shouldn’t take more than an hour. Both mother and father smiled at me in a mixture of relief and skepticism. Like most first time parents they were warned that the birth could often take hours.But the signs are never wrong, and within an hour, I was delivering the long awaited for child. All in all the birth had gone as we had planned, and my patient had done well. But this is where I remember that there certain that happened that was unusual, but not so unusual as to cause any alarm in my medically trained mind. Every human body is different, so one is taught to expect all manner of variations but in this case there was lot anomalies.

Let’s start at the beginning. The baby came out and as was normal, she cried but then she stopped. I remember the nurse looking at me because usually newborn babies cry for a good long time until we are able to wrap the up, by this child stopped. As we cleaned the child up, I inspected her and she seemed to have all her parts, and it was until I looked at her ears did I notice that they were rather pointed, and I mean really pointed.

Now that child was probably the 300th delivery in my long career so I can say that I have seen quite a few babies. And in all that time, I had never seen a baby with ears that were shaped like that. But even though my mind catalogued the strangeness, the doctor in me decided that it was odd but nothing to be medically concerned about so I let it go and asked the nurse to wrap up the child so she could be presented to her parents. When I looked into my patient’s eyes and saw the tears streaming down her face as the nurse handed her the wrapped baby, I was happy. My patient had the child she had wanted for so many years.

Now here’s the second anomaly. The mother looked at the child and I saw the baby reach out her hand and touch the tears on her mother’s face. Seeing that was a bit of a shock because babies at that point are so unaware of their surroundings. I even thought to myself that maybe the baby reached her hand and didn’t even know her mother was crying. But the child left her hand on her mother’s face for longer than what would have been normal.  But the mother didn’t even notice and hugged the baby. And the third anomaly happened when the baby was handed to to the father, and the baby again reached a hand out and touched the father’s face. And I am watching this and thinking to myself, is this normal?

And the last anomaly and which had haunted me ever since, is when the baby is back in her mother’s arms and I can see the baby staring at me and I see the baby open her eyes and smiling at me. Babies don’t open their eyes and smile at me 15 minutes after having left their mother’s womb, at least not any baby I had seen up until this point. I remember staring back at the baby, too stunned to smile, and watched as the baby closed its eyes and went to sleep. I looked at my nurse and she had a strange look at her face. I know she had seen everything I had seen, but neither of us said anything. How could we? We could hear the happy parents thanking us both for the miracle of their new child. It seemed rude to me at least to mention the things we had seen. And my nurse agreed with me because she didn’t say anything either.

And I forgot about that strange birth until I started hearing it our staff meetings a few months later about the strange births that others had seen.  All the strange births were so much like my own experience where the babies had other little things different about their bodies, and displayed the same actions that the new baby had shown to me. And then I started reading about it on the internet and on the chat boards I participated with other doctors around the world. They had seen the same or similar things; strange looking children who smiled at their doctors.

And when the phenomena was documented, they told me I was the first one who experienced it. And when I was questioned about it and asked if I noticed anything strange in the birth, I told them what I had seen but I also told me that I also a mother and father who were crying because they finally had the child they had been wanting for so many years, and in the face of that miracle every thing about a birth is a little strange.