Eve couldn’t stand the prodding, probing fingers any longer.

“Has the baby turned?” she asked. “Is it facing the right way now?”

The midwife spared her a glance, but continued to probe her abdomen with ungentle fingers. When she finally straightened up, she spoke to Abraham, not to Eve.

“The baby is still breech. It’s lying with its head under the ribs and its buttocks on the right side of the pelvis. The knees are tucked up here on the left.”

“What are the chances of it turning?” he asked.

“Small, at this stage. It could come any day now. I’ll try to turn it during the delivery, but I might not be successful.”

“And if you can’t?”

The midwife wrinkled her nose. “Breech deliveries are always messy. There is usually tearing, and sometimes we have to use spoons to try to get the baby out. We are not always successful. I must remind you of the regulations governing the safe disposal of human remains. Especially with regards to the types of wood approved for coffins. New-growth pine only. Certainly no oak.”

Abraham flushed and shifted his body as though to hide the little side table that the midwife’s eyes had flickered towards.

“That’s an antique,” he told her. “It belongs to my wife’s grandmother. She is very old.”

Eve heard the clicking sound of her grandmother hobbling into the room with a stick.

“That table is registered and approved,” the old lady told the midwife in her papery whisper. “I have the documents if you wish to see them.”

“No need.” The midwife closed her hemp sack. She stood up to go, but the old lady wasn’t finished.
“What about an operation?” she asked.

The midwife turned slowly. “What did you say?”

“An operation to remove the baby from my granddaughter’s womb. Otherwise she and the baby will surely die.”

“Such things were outlawed many years ago.”

“Not on Olympus,” the old lady persisted. “There are rumours that they exist to this day. Especially among the families of the Controllers.”

Eve exchanged an uneasy glance with her husband. “My grandmother is just joking, aren’t you, Grandma?”

Jamie skimmed over that morning’s blog post before scrolling down to the comments. The last few days had been her most productive in weeks. Instead of obsessing about her rude neighbour, she had chan-nelled her anger into a flurry of writing. And if she sometimes caught herself longing for his little boy, she simply gathered up that emo-tion and used it to describe Eve’s worry about the baby in her belly.

It was the first time maternal emotion had ever felt real to her, and when things felt real, she wrote them better.

Even her readers had sensed the change. Comments on her blog were up to thirty a day. That was a lot, even for the most successful bloggers – the kind that didn’t have to go looking for a book deal, but had it handed to them on a plate.

Allowing herself to daydream, Jamie scrolled through the comments.

Posted by: Shoobeedoo

Ha! I knew the granny was going to turn out to be a rebel. Great post, thanks! Can’t wait to see what happens next.

Posted by: Cyril Att

I can’t work Abraham out. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? And I don’t really have a handle on his relationship with Eve. Sometimes he seems to care about her and other times he seems quite cold.

Posted by: Dineo

Yoh! Dis is 1 messed up wrld uve made. Hw can d Controlers tayk ol d gud stuf n lv nuttin 4 d rest f d ppl?

Posted by: Gugz

OMG! Your not going to kill Eve off are you? I will be so pissed. You can’t kill her and the baby.

Posted by: Foully Wooing Won

Can I call you Jemima?

Posted by: Ella

Don’t do it, Foully Wooing! She hates being called Jemima. 

Posted by: Ella

Seriously though, I love the way you’re building up the tension. This is better than The Hunger Games.

And so it went on for another twenty-four comments. Yes, four of them were written by her sisters, and another six by her close online friends, but Jamie knew that even friends and family would soon stop commenting if they got bored. The fact that they logged on every day to read what she’d written had to be a good sign.

She looked up as she heard the clank of the letterbox and saw the postman riding away on his bicycle. It reminded her that she’d been meaning to clear the junk mail out of her postbox since Wednesday. Picking up her remote, she went outside to tackle the mildly irritating chore.

The letterbox was in even worse shape than she’d thought. The local community newspaper was still wedged in there from Wednesday morning, along with a property magazine, a catalogue from Game, and another from Checkers. And that was in addition to a blizzard of flyers advertising everything from plumbing to tiling to tree felling.

Using both hands, Jamie started pulling out the mass of paper. It had rained the night before so everything was wet and pulpy. She was concentrating so hard on scraping bits of papier mâché out from the depths of the letterbox that she didn’t hear the man come up behind her.

“Want some help?”

Snatching her hands free of the letterbox, she scraped her wrists against the metal flap as she spun around.

“Who…?”

It was her neighbour.

“What do you want?” she demanded, still jangling from adrenalin and the pain in her wrists.