The title of this Literary Medblogging Project is “A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words”.

I solicited medbloggers to participate in this summer’s edition of the Project: Write a medically related story that is less than 1000 words from the following image:

Read the literary creations of the medblogging bards:

• The Blog That Ate Manhattan
• poeMD
• Emergiblog
• All Sounds to Silence Come
• Musings of a Dinosaur

(Curtsey to the lovely Barbados Butterfly who so wanted to emerge from her writing cocoon, but the chrysalis of work has foiled her efforts!)

To all the literary medbloggers who continue the tradition of nurses and doctors as storytellers, thank you.

The only reason why she ended up at the hospital was because someone had called an ambulance. She was sitting alone on the bench at a bus stop, cradling her protuberant belly and moaning in pain. It was late—maybe 2:00am or so?—and the medics easily coaxed her into the A-car.

It was an uneventful delivery; her son entered the sterile world of the operating room within the hour she arrived at the hospital. People were surprised to see her. The last time she had visited the hospital was about a year ago, when she had an abortion.

She was displeased with the birthmark. When the nurse placed her newborn son into her arms, she flinched. A black heart covered the right half of his face, as if someone had spilled ink on his head.

She held him, but said nothing. A nurse asked her to say, “Cheese!” and took several photographs of the couple. Mother and baby did not smile.

This was another black heart, another reminder of the hatred from the world. Two days ago, she saw a man with a dark heart tattooed on his neck. Last week, a child clutched two balloons while walking down the street with her parents; the two balloons formed a floating, wobbling heart. The two potholes on 4th Avenue near Park Street were shaped like hearts with ragged edges.

People seemed to speak incessantly about hearts. When the chic young women with Louis Vuitton bags dangling from their slender shoulders walked along 2nd Avenue, they always said, “I love you!” into their shiny cell phones the moment they passed her. She started to shout back at them to halt their taunts: “You do not love me! You hate me! I see your black hearts!”

The police asked her to stop shouting at the pedestrians. She spit at them.

In jail, the stains on the floor resembled watery hearts. She saw chains of hearts in the oatmeal that congealed in the plastic bowls. Holes shaped like hearts appeared only in the slices of white bread she received.

She had the abortions because people told her that she couldn’t take care of babies. Where would the children live? How would she purchase food, clothing, and toys for her kids? If she didn’t feel safe in the world, how could provide safety for them? If she took her medication as directed, they advised her, maybe she could raise a child with some help.

The medication, she knew, would further blacken her raven heart.

She looked at his face again. She removed him from her lap, placed him on the bed, wrapped her gown around her, and walked out of the room.

Her son started to cry.

These days, she skims the crowds with her eyes while smoking cigarettes by the fountain in the concrete park. During the rainy season, people often wear hoods or hats that obscure their faces; sometimes people carry their umbrellas too low over their heads. Occasionally she lurches forward in recognition, only to realize that she merely saw a shadow over the stranger’s face, not a dark birthmark.

Her son would be around twenty years old now. She wonders if he lives in the same city; sometimes she wonders if they had already crossed paths. She isn’t sure if she wants to meet him. She just wants to see him and how he has grown.

Black hearts no longer follow her the way they once did. Now that she is searching for them on the faces of men, they are more difficult to find. Perhaps the world no longer feels as much hate towards her. She’s not sure.

He keeps the black heart in a drawer in his apartment. The photograph of their unsmiling faces is buried between the old tee-shirts he no longer wears. His girlfriend occasionally traces the faint scar on his face with her fingertips; she only sees it when she is cologne close. He doesn’t recognize either person in the picture. It is as if the photograph is a generic paper insert in a low-quality picture frame.

She keeps looking. He keeps looking away.