Each year the SCWC*SD holds a writing contest in which all conferees are invited to participate. The rules are simple: Write a piece in any form you wish of no more than 250 words based on the topic announced Friday night. The topic for the 25th annual San Diego conference was “Any Spelling of the Word ‘No.'”
I Don’t Want to Know
by
Jennifer Silva Redmond
No, I don’t want to know. I would have before, I think. Not that it would have changed the way I felt at all, but just for the boring practical reasons–like choosing a paint color, say.
But now–when everything is lost to me, what good would it do?
He is gone. The person who was the focus of my life, who was in so many ways my partner. And the loss is still too fresh to have been digested fully. To have been properly mourned.
And for this new life to be taken from me, too, to leave me as well, as if by some fateful choice of its own. Suddenly the intimate population of my world has been decimated, almost overnight.
So when the doctor asked me, kindly, or thinking he was being kind, if I wanted them to share with me the gender of my unborn child, I shook my head, unable to speak. I cleared my throat and managed a faint, “No.” Then swallowed and tried again just to make myself clear before he spoke. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”
The end.
