Wrong Side Up in South Side, Chicago by Max Steiner

The mother-to-be is on the john with her back slumped against the tank and has 9-1-1 on speakerphone and yells out God she’s pretty sure she’s about to pop a baby right this second, and she tells the dispatch-lady where she’s at on W. Madison—one of the easier shifts her super’s been making sure to toss her the last couple three months because she knows all about how it is: you’re young and you’re single and no paid maternity leave and it’s one nasty bitch to keep scrubbing grime and schlepping hampers and dusting ceiling fans for minimum when you’re showing that baby bump—and the voice on the other end asks how far apart are her pains, more than two minutes or less, which still sitting on the toilet the mother-to-be says she doesn’t know, has no clue, and call it a woman’s intuition but something deep down inside her tells her her baby’s on its way out ass first, its head bumping up high against her ribcage and sniffing its toes, which raises serious alarm bells on the other end of the line and so the voice tells the mother-to-be to number one get off the can and put down some clean towels if she has them and most importantly to resist the urge to push, and the mother-to-be does as she’s told and is down on her knees on a towel and head resting on her arms hugging bathroom tile in a kind of yogic child’s pose pointed at the toilet bowl, is down next to where her water broke and pooled and where her show’s mucus plug wobbles in the puddle like a blob of pinkish Jell-O, and the dispatch-lady tells the mother-to-be how she’s doing such a good job and assures her she’s right here with her on the other end of the line and just you stay strong hon you’ve got help coming your way.

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MAX STEINER — Max lives and writes in Berlin. Find more of his work in Rejection Letters, Bending Genres, and SAND.

Art by OCH GONZALEZ — Och’s work has appeared in Brevity Journal, Panorama Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Lunch Ticket, Complete Sentence Lit, and Santelmo Journal, among others. Her essays have also been included in the literary anthologies in The Practice of Creative Writing and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. You can find her art at och_gonzalez.