Mark A. Mondalek

 

Mark A. Mondalek (born April 24, 1987) is a current undergraduate college student from Grosse Pointe, Michigan majoring in fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago. Stocked with a large portfolio of unpublished short stories, novellas and assorted prose in the process of being properly polished, he hopes to release his long-awaited book of short fiction soon after graduation, if not earlier, tentatively titled "Beat Of The Sacrificial Drum."

 

"A Map Of Cosmic Microwaves" is a tale that follows his common affinity for stories involving ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances with a lead character who's faced with the oddly Joseph-like prospect of aiding the young daughter of his far too intoxicated next-door neighbor through the nerve-racking birthing process of a child born without any viable father-figure in sight. It's an overall journey that bears an overwhelming effect upon the characters own personal revelations and thus his unavoidably warped ideals as a result.

 

 

 

A Map Of Cosmic Microwaves

 

 

     Without a single word, Bailey's thrown into the birthing room upon his own velocity. One of the nurses slapped a surgical mask across his face while another slid a hospital gown on top of his clothes. There was a definite rift between them and the scattered Japanese midwives striving towards working alongside the rest of the more economically qualified members of the medical staff, wearing robes of white and swift decisions at their sleeves. Michelle lies in the center of all the terrible joy and lovely animosity, propped upon a bed with a white sheet covering her spread legs in turquoise knee-highs. Sweat is beading down her brow and she's screaming like the Earth is passing through her womb.

     Being pushed towards Michelle by the assisted aid of the male nurse operating more like the school house bully than a member of the health force, Bailey is basically given no other option but to impart his way into the crowd. Past a confused bolt of reluctance, he arrived to Michelle's side, offering his hand and resting his other shoulder somewhere in-between one of the many pillows supporting her back. Her palm felt just as damp and desperate as a swamp seaweed rag stuck to the bottom of the ocean.

     He'd never held her hand before or really been anything but neighborly to a required degree, acknowledging her with a wave of the hand or a brisk "how are you?" throughout most of their affiliation. Mr. Edminton would customarily come around in a desperate search over a pinch of sugar or a cup of milk, of which Penelope would always gladly deploy. He grew vegetables for a living, but he had a sweet tooth at heart. Bailey often liked to entice him into spinning a yarn or two and Mr. Edminton did entertain him so. He was the type of guy who went to church every Sunday just to spy on all the sinners, people-watching like the man up above in a Wizard of Oz sort of way. He wasn't so much a horrible gossip as he was a fantastic parleyer of illustrious assumptions and extremely close-minded ones at that.

     Studiously spouted the granny of the two other midwives, "Women typically deliver during the early morning." She smiled with the humbled cheer of vast experience in her eyes, shifting towards Bailey but hoping the head doctor might hear; a hollow shell of professionalism by comparison, looking no more kindred of a spirit than a spindly stalk of lettuce or Ann Coulter dressed in drag. "It's the tide, you know. Everyone always has their babies high tide."

     Even medical science has to meet with tradition at some point in time. Still, the head obstetrician ignored every word if he was even listening in the first place. The birthing room itself was small and stuffed. A four-story window looking out upon an alleyway full of trash cans and oil stains was the only impact towards the outside world to be seen, otherwise they could've all been on Neptune as far as anybody would be able to rightly justify.

     To avoid passing out from a fraudulent fear of the unknown, Bailey took a page from Michelle's playbook and habituated into a supreme state of loss versus gain in realizing the raw intricacies involved in his own birth a solid twenty-some years ago. What is it to conceive in the first place? Was it a false frequency or a unanimous decision and thus who decides? It seemed a bit difficult to understand amidst the beating dream, creating a stream of constant blinks in obtuse palpitations piping through his body.

     Pure madness ensued with doctors peeking beneath the white sheet and shouting mixed directions of encouragement towards Michelle, all of which vibrate through the room like a dead horse that's been endlessly beaten to the ground and the scene falls victim to a blur of motion, sucked into a vacuum ice cube trapped in time. It was as if the entire hospital itself had been invisibly captured within a giant sprawling net; trapped like tuna headed south and foiled in a stream of all the same when it came down to it. No one could stake claim on a single discrepancy, yet it was still the most lonesome crowd that Bailey had ever been associated with; deceptively together and so beautifully separate that it fell beyond complete and utter definition, only to be launched towards the bright incandescent mass burning constantly in the sky and helplessly cradled beneath the soaked superstructure deck where all the life boats are kept, free to their own lack of judgement forever again.

     Michelle cried out in shrieking pain and brought Bailey back into his world of woe. His was bright and glaring, not dark and gloomy like the world of the gods. How insufficient it seems for the sake of a new soul to be swamped into such absurdity! The binding threshold brought Michelle to the point where she wasn't sure if it was an angel from heaven or Lucifer himself angled head first through her birth canal.

     "Aren't they pumping her with something?" shuttered Bailey towards one of the humbled midwives, nervous as can be.

     "Ask them in the corner," she said,  considerably younger than the rest, pointing towards the back of the room where two Indian fellows stood confidently in their lab coats with their arms folded just right; maternal-fetal medicine specialists appearing strong in their respected field.

     Bailey let his hand go limp, released it from Michelle's trembling grasp and bolted their way. They couldn't have been any more calmer by contrast. Their faces were set to a tune of casual dormancy about their wrinkled regard.

     "She's all set, bro," said the first one with thick-rimmed glasses, already aware of Bailey's concern. "We pumped her up full blast. She's thoroughly fucked for sure, I promise."

     "It's just excitement...nerves, you know?" the other specialist explained.

     "She is so silly how she cries out like teakettle," giggled another one of the midwives in elapsed secrecy as she quietly cut-in on the conversation. "Battle-pain is dead in this country, reserved only for men with nothing to even prove. They will never know such honor."

     Distraught with professional opinions, Bailey returned to Michelle's side, willingly this time. She was the only reasonable human being left in the entire hospital it seemed and so he hung on for dear life, which was the propriety of the whole debacle to begin with. Nothing ever changes. If anything, it all shifts the same. The electronic thump of the babies heartbeat pulsing through speakers above Bailey's head hindered his thought stream completely, hearing only screams of anxiety and the Doppler ultrasound banging against his rattled brain. Pleading obstetricians began to compete with the thunderous vortex faction of genetic compatibility and civil war. Whether conscious or irrational, this is where pheromones lead us in the end.

     "You're close, Michelle. You're really close!" the head doctor urged, oddly passionate.

     "Keep pushing!" screamed another, "Just one more push, Michelle! Just one more and another big one after it!"

     The eldest widwife peeked underneath the sheet hovering over Michelle's legs like a little girl spying on an early birthday present, mouth aghast in glorified awe.

     "The head is showing! You're almost there, darling!" she happily rejoiced, trying to nudge Bailey accordingly, but he refused to do so much as even turn in her direction. "Your baby is done with heaven, daddy! Push your baby into our world, dear!"

     She likened happiness on Earth down to that of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts straight from the toaster. It was all Bailey cared to visualize at the moment and he utterly hated breakfast entirely, having tasted early morning more than the common man could ever even imagine. No nourishment in the land could ever stand to properly supplement such endless days of bitter predictability.

     With imbalanced patience, the nurses huddled closer, preparing to wrap the child in immediate postnatal care, holding medical towels and cleansers grasped within their arms. Clocks only get set to explode. Everything's a carbon copy of another empty equivalent of nothing and eventually the moment managed to arrive in euphoric fashion for all to the sound of a newborn crying, crackling into the aura of such absolute ambiance towards the sight of blood and the snap of Michelle's umbilical cord being sliced and severed by way of Bailey's trembling hands, coupled together with the overwhelming relief engulfing the entire room altogether like silence after a storm.