Moira was made to be a mother. It was in her nature, they had always said. A good girl, always helpful. She took care of others. And the babies. She had so much love for the babies, their round little arms that felt gentle as butter. She loved the crowns of their heads, soft as eggs.
Her sister had six of them. Six. How, Moira never knew. The husband hardly had a pick of fat on him. She never had seemed the type when they were young either. Six, you know. She had her hands full, they all said. Not Moira. She had time on her hands.
She adjusted her sign and turned again to walk past the front of the squat, brown building. It was cold here in Colorado, a bite to the wind coming off the high mountains. She was glad she had thought to bring a thermos of soup, and a spare one to share too. And a few hats and a spare jacket in case anyone forgot their own. The wind could be bitter, and the newer members didn’t always come prepared for standing out in it.
A car rolled up the road and turned into the parking lot, a pale girl within. Moira surged forward with the others, moving as a mass, working their signs like crosses at a funeral.
‘Satan’s work!’
‘God can see! He sees, and He judges!’
The car rolled on, determined. Moira and the rest followed as close as they could, shouting all the way.
A woman in a pink jacket emerged from the low building and went to meet the car. Moira glared at her. She had a kind face, Moira thought, but her dyed blonde hair told her all she needed to know. You could never trust women who dyed their hair.
Moira was a veteran at this. Twenty years now she had been coming up here, off and on, whenever she could. It broke her heart to see those pictures of tiny babies, sliced up like gone-off bologna, thrown out in the trash and forgotten. If they could only see, these women, if they could only think.
The blonde woman walked back towards the clinic with her arm around the girl who had been in the car, pushing through the people and their signs, heads down.
‘Blood on your hands!’ Moira shouted, shoving her sign towards the women. ‘Stains on your souls!’
She had made the sign herself, a photo-collage of bloody fetus parts that she had then drenched in red paint. It never failed to draw gasps, even from the other protestors when they first saw it. If people saw reality, Moira was sure, they would never do what they did.
God wanted women to be mothers. Even Sarah. God had blessed her when she and Abraham had given up all hope.
He had blessed Moira too, late in life, or so she had thought at first. Their last chance, she had said to Willie. Their Isaac.
They had hope for those few months until the scan ended it. No heartbeat. That was that. These stupid girls had no idea what they were throwing away. Those lovely babies.
She turned one last time as the doors closed behind the two women.
‘Murderers!’ she shouted to the empty air.
The cold air held the word in tendrils of smoke, like a bad omen. Moira’s sign flapped in the cold wind.
#WCJan2018
Written as part of The Writing Cooperative’s January 2018 #challenge — ‘Seeing in a New Light’, writing from a perspective different than one’s own.
