Week six.  
There is a natural disaster occurring, tsunamis of
morning queasiness Monday through Friday, Tuesday's
lunch on my favorite pants, denial dances on the weekends.
It was Sunday. One word, two syllables caused a tornado
of emotions, hurricanes of tears hit my hands and pours to
the floor, my heart sinks and drowns. How many casualties will there be?

Fact:
I account for thirteen percent of the population but
thirty-seven percent of all abortions.

Saturday.
With my hoodie sheltering my identity, I enter the building.
Protestors, shouting this is ******, hand me pamphlets that I ball up and
throw away, sign my name and wait. Blood samples and *** tests.
Ultrasound pictures, nurses ask do I want to be sleep or awake?
Counselor asks how will I feel on Sunday? Floods of tears drench
my shirt, uncertainty and guilt gets caught in my throat. It’s time.

Fact: I am five times more likely to get an abortion than white women.

I remain stoic.
But in the inside, I tremble like a newborn antelope fearing the new world.
I weep like a lioness losing her cub. The nurses strap my legs to the paddles.
My heart beats and I swore if you looked closely, you could see it protruding
out my chest, my mind races and I swore I saw galaxies and landed on Saturn,
I stare out at the strawberry colored walls and I remembered how far along
the nurse said I was. I couldn't muster the nerve to look at the ultrasound screen.

Fact: Sixty-nine percent of pregnancies of black women are unintended compared
to fifty percent of hispanic women and forty percent of white women.

Seven weeks and six days.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the numbers. I’ve been here for eight hours.
At half an inch long, it is about the size of a blueberry with webbed fingers and toes.
Out of wedlock birthrates among black women is seventy-two percent, fifty-four percent
for hispanic women, and twenty-nine percent for white women. I was doomed to be a statistic
either way. The procedure took five minutes, though it felt longer than the whole day I
was there, as if the hands of the clock stubbornly refused to move.

Fact: Abortion has killed more black Americans than crime, accidents, cancer, and AIDS.

In a daze.
I didn't hear the nurse say it was over. A wave of cramps wash over my lower body leaving a
paralyzing feeling in my legs. I remembered the nurse had taken the final ultrasound image.
I lifted my head a little to see but I didn't have the courage to look that time either so I averted my eyes to the ceiling but I knew it was pitch black. I could no longer hear any lightning that
ripples through the clouds or feel the avalanche of Wednesday’s pizza ready to erupt on my coat. The worst is over now. All that’s left to do is count the catastrophes. I call this my own
personal genocide. I put on my clothes and swallow the antibiotic pill as the nurses speak
but I cannot hear. It is all silent.

It is all silence.
It all fades. It all fades.