Writers Bloc 10: The 2020 Henderson Writers Group Anthology: Writers Bloc, #10

By Henderson Writers Group, Bryant C. Thomas, Beverley J. Davis and 18 more

The Henderson Writers Group challenges its members each year to submit works for blind judgement. Those with top scores are presented here.

 

Enjoy this multitude of works written by Beverly J. Davis, Brandi Hoffman, Pat Kranish, David R. Long, Keiko Moriyama, Rick Newberry, Chike Nzerue, Wolf O'Rourc, Lori Piotrowski, Donna Pletzer-DeVargas, Joe Van Rhyn, Valerie J. Runyan, Laura Engel Sahr, Judy Salz, Willow Seymour, Arleen Sirois, Nancy Sanders Tardy, Bryant C. Thomas, William Darrah Whitaker, and Duke Woodrick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henderson Writers Group
• Release date: Feb 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393048206

Henderson Writers Group

Beverly J. Davis, Brandi Hoffman, Pat Kranish, David R. Long, Keiko Moriyama, Rick Newberry, Chike Nzerue, Wolf O'Rourc, Lori Piotrowski, Donna Pletzer-DeVargas, Joe Van Rhyn, Valerie J. Runyan, Laura Engel Sahr, Judy Salz, Willow Seymour, Arleen Sirois, Nancy Sanders Tardy, Bryant C. Thomas, William Darrah Whitaker, and Duke Woodrick.

Book preview

Writers Bloc 10

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The 2020 HWG Anthology

Copyright © December 2020 by Henderson Writers Group

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The material in Writers Bloc 10 represents the artistic vision of the authors published herein and is their sole property with all right reverting to the authors up publication. No part of the collection may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without written permission of the individual authors.

The authors may be contacted through the HWG website,

www.hendersonwritersgroup.com.

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Interior Design: Audrey Balzart, Wolf O'Rourc

Cover Design: Joe Van Rhyn

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ISBN-13: 9781393048206 (e-book), 9798708282354 (paperback)

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Printed in the United States of America

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All rights reserved.

FORWARD

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The Henderson Writers Group is a 501C3 (non-profit) organization with a goal of helping writers all of skill levels improve their craft. We accept everybody and all types of writing. With this in mind, we encourage members to submit their best works of up to 4000 words for blind judging outside of the group and establish a score cut-off for publication. The results are published in this anthology, unedited.

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SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR JUDGES

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The HWG extends appreciation to the members of Writerscache, Cache Valley Chapter of the League of Utah Writers, for taking their valuable time to judge our many submissions.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

2019 SUBMISSIONS

Breath of Heaven

Clem’s Bar

Dave

Death Waits

Dressed

Grandma

Missed Diagnosis

Naki Swims

Pink Pursuit

Resilience

Soul for a Soul

The Aerial Daredevil

The Bishop’s Lair

The Brass Ring

The Lowest Common Denominator

The Plight of the Acadians

The Royalle Life

SPOOKY STORY & HOLIDAY STORY WINNERS

Caution, Danger, Keep Out

A Scary Night in Peril

The Twelve Days of Trump Christmas

STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP WINNER

The Plight of the Artist

A SPECIAL CORONA VIRUS STORY

Game of Conferences

Biographies

Writers Bloc 10

2019 SUBMISSIONS

Breath of Heaven

a work of Nonfiction by

Bryant C. Thomas

After a rush of increasingly deeper incisions, doctors abruptly pulled the limp form of our daughter’s pasty blue body from my wife’s exposed womb. I had never seen anything like this before. Oh sure, I had played an active role in the birth of our first daughter, drawing her into the world through a process far more natural than this. Yet a cesarean section is anything but natural. The womb, one of God’s most precious points of contact with this world, should not have to be hoisted from a woman’s body and laid open with the bite of a scalpel. But these things are necessary. Such is the way of our fallen world.

Our baby had been growing in a frank breech position. This means her bottom was pointing downward with her limbs and torso folded up in a v-like fashion. Normally, this wouldn’t be so bad. Amniotic fluid should allow a fetus the freedom and mobility to move about and develop strength, but our baby didn’t have that luxury. Overwhelming complications had brought us to this point. No amniotic fluid gushed out as they cut open the womb. There simply wasn’t any. And worst of all, the doctors had assured us that she would be born without lungs. I had seen the ultrasounds myself—nothing in our baby’s chest but a large heart. No trachea... not even little nubs signifying the start of lung development. Nothing hidden somewhere we could not see. No trace of certain telltale chemicals which would indicate the existence of lung tissue. She simply didn’t have lungs. Of course, this meant she would die shortly after birth.

They were having trouble extracting the head. The body flopped about like a rag doll bearing an ounce of sand in each limb. Flip, turn. Flop, flop. The legs seemed to be magnetically linked to one shoulder, returning to that position natural­ly while the doctors turned her tiny body this way and that. I tried not to look at her feet. They were pinched flat-outward as if broken or crushed by some uterine accident. In a sense, I suppose, this was absolutely true.

One of the doctors slipped his hand inside the uterus to ease around the head until, with a cooperated effort and a wet splorp sound, they pulled her out. She lay on her side for a moment while hands worked within and around my wife and our tiny baby. I noticed how her little blue face moved in a quizzical fashion, her tiny mouth reflexively testing her new environ­ment for the link which would ensure her survival in this world. BREATHE, I commanded. My wife’s hospital roommate had given birth under similar circum­stances and had laughed while telling us how her newborn baby’s cry sounded like the bleating of a little lamb. How I longed to hear that now!

But our baby made no such sound. She gaped for breath which didn’t come, turning with clenched eyes as if struggling to figure it out, somehow get it right.

Then she was gone. Someone whisked her away to some secret hospital destination.

I had watched her for those few seconds: blue, silent, instinc­tively groping for life... and then my soul withered as the shadow of death descended over my family. In times like these, the Word of God comes unbidden to ease the pain:

Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked I will depart.

The LORD has given and the LORD has taken away.

Praise the name of the LORD.

– Job 1:21

Awake through the entire procedure, my wife lay strapped to the table unable to move anything but her head, a curtain strategically hung across her chest to mercifully block her view. Now she turned to me with imploring eyes. Still, I just stroked her hair and listened, hoping to catch the faintest sound of a brand new life. Instead I heard clinical voices saying, Is that it? Twelve-oh-four?

It’s 12:04.

All right. That’s it. 12:04 A.M., just a few minutes into Thursday, April 18, 1996.

Were they announcing a birth or recording her death? Or both? What could I say to my wife? What could be said? No sound, no lungs... no life. The reality of the moment hit me like the very sledgehammer of God.

It didn’t have to end this way, of course. God could have done a miracle. Having been a Christian for more than twenty years, I had seen him perform many miracles on my behalf. And I had seen him pointedly not work in response to fervent prayers. Even so, as a Christian, one must continue to believe that he knows what he’d doing – right?

That’s what we believed three months prior to this. My wife’s water broke on a Sunday, January 21, in her 17th week of pregnancy. Having suffered a miscarriage the previous year, we recognized the signs immediately and rushed her to the emergency room. After examining her, the doctors explained how some­times these things just happen, and ordered her to remain in the hospital for the next few days, during which time they expected her body to naturally expel the fetus. They explained the chances of a fetus surviving with no amniotic fluid was very rare, and even if it might, it would almost certainly suffer multiple abnormali­ties.

We were given the option to abort the fetus in the interest of acceler­ating the expulsion process. While this whole situation mortified us, the last thing we wanted was to rack up a huge medical bill while waiting for Jewel’s body to rid itself of a baby which may not be meant to live. We had no health insurance at the time, but neither did we support the idea of aborting our baby if there was a sliver of a chance she could be saved. Our doctors assured us we had done nothing which could have caused this, so we decided to pray and wait for God to handle it.

Our baby held on that night, and the next, and throughout the remainder of the week. We discussed the risks again, a growing list of alarming options, and once more decided to let God make the final determination.

This was no easy thing. During the next few weeks, our baby, Jessica, continued to thrive. Yet, the doctors were loathe to offer us hope, citing that regardless of continued growth and a strong heart­beat, Jewel’s womb simply did not have enough amniotic fluid for normal fetal development. They warned us of probable mental retarda­tion, the likeli­hood of atrophied limbs and/or spina bifida, and the risk of infection wherein the fetus might become septic and pose a serious threat to my wife’s health. We underwent genetic counseling and learned to read ultra­sounds along with the doctors. Even with full bed rest, Jewel could only maintain 2 to 3 centimeters of fluid in her womb, not the 15+ required for a fetus to grow normally.

We prayed a lot, asking everyone in our church to pray along with us. We had friends and family ask their associ­ates to pray for our unborn child as well. Another friend linked us into a prayer chain via the Inter­net, even then in the mid 1990’s.

Our doctors explained how, if our baby could hold on until the 26th week, she would be considered a viable fetus; that is, one which may actually have a chance for survival outside the womb. The longer she grew in utero, the better her chances would be on the outside. Astounding every medical person specialist and office in­volved, Jessica did just that. So Jewel was readmitted to the hospital at the start of her 26th week.

My wife was committed to full bed rest and constant monitoring for the next two weeks. She received regular steroid shots to help in the develop­ment of fetal lung tissue, but continued ultrasounds and more testing verified the unthinkable: Our baby had no lungs. Without amniotic fluid to breathe in and out, she had no opportunity to develop lungs. As long as she remained attached to the umbilical cord in the womb, she would continue to thrive. After that, well... we really couldn’t bear to think on it much.

Jewel came home. Jessica continued to grow in-(compromised)-utero. My wife and I sat alone at a coffee shop one night discussing the impact her brief life had already made on all those concerned. Perhaps that was the fulfillment of her life’s mission on this planet. As the shop closed, we discussed in hushed tones how to make proper funeral arrange­ments for our child.

During church the following Sunday, while the congregation prayed for God to create lungs where there were none, my wife saw an incredible thing: she saw a vision. A tiny blue baby lay in her upheld hands, the umbilical cord hanging down. She was giving Jessica up to the LORD. He took her, kissed her on the cheek and gently smiled. He then blew into Jessica’s mouth, giving her breath, and placed her back into Jewel’s arms.

My wife kept this to herself until later, fearing that this ‘vision’ was more a manifestation of hope rather than a clear and true message from the living God. After five years of marriage, however, I can verify she has never before claimed to have experienced anything like this.

On a Thursday night, April 17, at the end of her 28th week, I came home early from my swing shift only to turn around and rush my wife to the hospital once again. She was in labor, had already dilated to five centimeters. Nurses began prepping her for surgery. I stood alone in a hallway wearing blue scrubs and a surgical mask. Once admitted into the delivery room, I counted half a dozen nurses and doctors inside, with more shoving in behind me.

My wife lay on a table shaped for all purposes like a crucifix. They had given her a spinal block, strapped her down with arms straight out to either side, and draped her body with surgical towels. Her belly, yellow with antiseptic and taped off in a square blue frame, lay exposed to the glare of numerous lights pulled into position overhead.

They had a special place for me: a stool set between where her head rested on a tiny pillow and a bucket which contained whatever shot into it from a few gory tubes. (I would soon christen this the ‘blood bucket’) Various high-tech apparatuses crowded the room, but I was not allowed to move; nor did I want to. I sat there amid all the beeps and verbal commands trying to comfort my wife while, on the other side of the curtain, they sliced her open. I watched them scoop out a few small organs and edge them onto her white belly like it was no big deal, drawing up the prize of her womb. They carefully withdraw from it the smallest, most twisted person I have ever seen. After all the prayer, after all the hope and all the faith, it had come down to this:

Our baby was blue, and she was silent.

Our little Jessica was gone.

It was 12:04 A.M., just a few minutes into Thursday, April 18, 1996, and my wife wanted an answer. But I had none. There was nothing to say.

Someone leaned close to me, as I knew someone would, but instead of somberly asking me to join them out in the hallway, this nurse asked, Would you like to see your baby?

I thought Jessica had been already whisked away to some other locale by now—couldn’t really think about it too much—but as the nurse led me around the surgeons suturing up my wife, I spotted our tiny baby still in this same room. They had placed her on a little table with a heat lamp blazing overhead. She lay silent, still in her strange contorted position, wiggling ever so slightly under the multiple hands working around her. The expected wires and tiny tubes had already been applied to her pink little body.

– Pink.  PINK!

I glanced at the man holding a respirator mask to her face. She’s pink, I blurted. That’s good, right? I mean, she couldn’t be pink if she weren’t aerating! Someone replied they couldn’t commit to anything until they took her down to X-ray. But she’s PINK, I countered. She couldn’t turn pink without lungs. That means there’s something there, right? Right?

Gaining no further comment from the medical team, I was ushered back to my post where I told Jewel what I had seen. Jessica and her entourage wheeled out of the room while the surgeons sewed up my wife. It took about twenty minutes, during which time they discussed the accolades of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart before crimping her final incision with a deft line of staples.

Jewel was taken to a nearby recovery room. After ensuring all was well with her, I hurried to the lobby to call our families. Yes, we were still waiting on