“Ahhhhhhh!  My Baby!”  His wife screamed.

     “Don’t worry, Thera, it will be all right.  Just one more push.”  Drew held tightly to her hand as she struggled to give birth.  The midwife, at the foot of the bed, was watching for the head to crown.

     “Almost there,” the midwife said, using a towel to staunch the flow of blood, too much blood.  She had never witnessed a birth as slow as this one.  The woman had been in labor for two whole days.  She was almost at the end of her strength.

     “Just one more, my darling.”  She tried for him.  Drew was her love and her life, and this child was a result of their life together, a forbidden love.  She so desperately wanted this child to be born.  So she pushed, and her life and the child flowed out of her.

     “Here it be,” the midwife said, catching the child in a clean blanket.  “Face down the babe is, sir.”  The midwife noticed a strange hump on the child’s back, started to mention it, but turned the child over instead to examine it further, and pulled back in surprise, uttering a startled shriek.

     “No, Thera, don’t leave me!”  Drew cried, watching his wife’s dying breath.  Then he jerked his attention to the midwife who was holding his child as though it were the devil himself.  He grabbed a second blanket from the pile by the bed and threw it around the baby, grabbing it before the midwife had a chance to drop it.  The sudden movement of being yanked from one person to the other filled the baby’s lungs with air, and it let out a wail.

     “That’s no baby like I’ve ever seen.”  The midwife was backing away towards the door, gathering her things as she went.  “I’d take it out and kill it if I were you.”  She ducked out of the door as Drew roared his anger at her, frightening the child, and increasing her crying.