Gloria's Dream

The painful knot in my stomach is hurting as I realize my Newborn Nursery is packed with many strange people milling about. I feel the lack of air and space and as my height increases, I see my lack of power.

Nobody looks at my face. 

Looking down at the crowd of moving chattering men and women, I spy two shiny twin roaches on the floor.

“It's true! There are bugs in the hospital!”

The twin roaches are big enough to fit into a bassinet, though I know they would never stay there and I am not going to use a precious isolette incubator to secure them! Anyway, you could never put two roaches in the same incubator because they would eat each other up. 

I feel sick.

I shrink and I feel abundant air to breathe. 

Empowered by oxygen, I tell the old woman to get away from the newborn babies! 

She turns to our wooden rocking chair and pulls its handle. No food comes out of the arm. 

Money pours out of the rocking chair arm onto the floor but she is gone.

Gathering the money up in my arms to hide it, I look to see of there is a hospital camera trained on me. I do not want anyone to think I am stealing.

A newborn baby stands up in its bassinet and she is my little niece. “Get me down! Get me down!” she commands. I cannot take my eyes off the blinking blue lights on the wall over each bassinet.

It's an airfield runway!” 

Amazement staggers me.

Just then I see the silver gleam of long thin scissors flying through the air at me! 
 Dr. Bever has thrown them at me when I wasn't looking!

The scissors hit my right anterior shoulder crippling my arm.

“Dirty scissors!" I scream. “Dirty scissors!”

I am screaming as I come to wakefulness.

My right arm is also waking up from where I slept on it almost unto its death.

My husband shakes me in alarm. “What's wrong?” he asks. “You were screaming.”

“I was?” I say sleepily. “What about?”

“Dirty scissors, or something.”

“I don't know”, I say, rolling over toward him. “I'm probably afraid I cut myself on dirty scissors with hepatitis blood on them.”

          “Good god,” my husband mutters unhappily in a self-preservation tone as he turns his back to me and goes back to sleep.