Dad's first name in print

The form. That is what I keep coming back to. I thought I was going to lose the bag. I had already braced for the bag, and then he handed me a piece of paper and I read my dad's first name on it and my hands went cold before my shoulder even registered.

He did not know what he was handing me. Clean shirt. Official motion. Thumb into a bruise I am going to feel for a week. The form had my full name and underneath, the contact line, and there it was: him. As if the State needed my father to find me. As if I have been hiding behind my mother this whole time.

The worst part is I am not going to call him. I am going to fold this form and put it on the bedside table next to the bakkie keys and lie here with the shoulder aching and not call him. He will never know a clean-shirted man put his name on a Section 65. He will never know the bag was a gravid female in a cloth sack. Good. Let him not know. That is the cleanest thing I have felt all day.

I did not go to Day Hospital. That is also a clean thing. I sat at the counter with cold pasta and ibuprofen and the form next to the plate and thought: if I go, they will ask how, and I will have to say the words, and the words involve a State man and a letter will arrive at the same address where my dad is not. So no. Antiseptic. New dressing. Done.

The female is quiet in the holding room. She does not know I nearly lost her at the bowser. She just knows the dark and the heat mat. I owe her more than tonight.