Unholy Trinity: A Birth Story by Caiti Quatmann
Our church worships at the altar of the Unholy Trinity. Its gospels are delivered as a trio of dark drabbles, linked so that Three become One. All hail the power of the Three.
I.
Blinding lights and pain. The room was alive with chaos, as if an unseen beast was ripping her open. Her screams mingled with the sterile hum of the operating room, each contraction like raw claws tearing through muscle and flesh.
Unmedicated. Her body fought the intrusion, but the pain was primal, fierce, and relentless. The doctors moved with urgent precision, faces obscured by drapes and masks, while she endured the wild, feral agony.
Her baby’s cries echoed faintly, a haunting reminder of the life she was fighting to bring into the world, as the beasts above roared their final rage.
II.
In the clinical silence of the hospital, she drifted like a spectral figure. The birth had been a blur, her mind dissociating to escape the trauma.
She lay in the dimly lit room, unable to hold her baby, who lay in the bassinet, just beyond her reach. Each creak of the hospital bed felt like a distant echo, her surroundings a mere apparition.
Sleep eluded her, and she wandered through her days in a fog of memories and pain, a ghost haunted by the shadows of what she couldn’t remember, unable to connect with the life she had just birthed.
III.
Home was no sanctuary; it was a place of feverish delirium. The doctors discharged her after four days, failing to notice the dawning infection.
Her body, this vessel of new life, flooded with the threat of death. She was collapsing into sepsis, her skin a sallow mask of illness.
The once comforting familiarity of home felt alien as she fought the creeping poison within. Her body, wracked with chills and unrelenting pain, seemed to be slipping away, leaving her on the precipice of an abyss, where the family she’d so desperately fought to have now threatened to claim her instead.
Caiti Quatmann
Caiti Quatmann (she/her) is a disabled poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Yoke (MyrtleHaus) and Editor-in-Chief for HNDL Mag. She studied and taught writing at the University of Missouri St. Louis. Her poetry and personal essays have been published by Thread LitMag, The Closed Eye Open, and others. Caiti lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and teaches at a local Microschool. Find her on Instagram and Threads @CaitiTalks.
