In a hospital, just on the outskirts of a bustling, million population city, in a small ward tucked off the side of the maternity wing, a baby had started crying at the first touch of the morning’s pale light on its smooth, bald head.

  The nurse on night duty; a young woman new to the job and nervous but excited to be responsible for caring for the newborn lives entrusted to her; had popped up quickly, rushing off over to lift the baby from its cheap plastic crate, rocking and cooing the little boy back to sleep.

  She had learned very young that soft, easy motions, and soft, easy sounds were the best for calming babies.

  For all the warmth and joy the little baby’s face stirred in her heart, a small thread of jealousy couldn’t help but worming in.

  From early childhood, the only option for her had been medicine.

  It had been a thing remarked on, at family events and around holiday dinner tables and while the young girl had rocked and cooed and doted over younger cousins and siblings.

  ‘Destiny,’ or ‘She’s found what calls her.’

  She had been the one to play doctor, when the children played war games. When other kids had hurt themselves, on the playgrounds or running through the marshy fields and half-collapsed buildings where they congregated to play, she had always been the one to care for them. Comforting, bandaging, wrapping clumsy attempts at bandages around their wounds as others rushed for parents.

  Blood had never scared her. She had never been squeamish - wounds, dead bodies, pus, shit, decay, these had always only been simple threats to her. Where maggots and dead animals sent others running, a small voice in her head only wanted to lean in, to look at the muscles exposed beneath the torn flesh; always thinking of how such a wound should have been treated or cared for, if gotten to in time.

  Her younger brother had asked her once how she heard the world differently, how she heard the stories of far off wars and deceased relatives and the bodies of the horrifically dead and all the horrors of the world so easily. She had thought for a moment and responded, ‘It all just feels like a simple wound, that must just be stitched or fixed. It all feels simple, when you look for how to heal, not anything else.’

  It could be said that this was the soul of the nurse, the young woman bouncing the baby gently in the pale-grey mist of dawn that day, to heal. To help.

  Medicine had always been the only career option for her, the care for the helpless and wounded and young. Nothing other than motherhood and .

  But the world had intervened, as it always does, denying her her wish of a degree and a job in delicate surgeries and fast-paced operating rooms.

  So she had compromised, studied for nursing instead, scraping by on what money she could scrounge and borrow and loan. Always striving, driven by her calling.

  Then, the News.

  The word that had shattered her world.

  A routine doctor's visit.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  And one word.

  Sterile.

  She had almost broken.

  Learning that she would never be a mother herself had devastated her.

  But she had kept forging ahead, getting a job in nursing, specializing in infant care, all to hold the broken shards of her own dreams that much closer to her own heart.

  That was the jealousy that wormed through her in the light of that pale shaft of dark morning glow.

  The jealousy of Motherhood, stolen by fate from her, gifted so carelessly to others who didn’t or couldn’t care for their children.

  The baby she held wasn’t her own, but some part of her mind, some small delusion hidden from even her own sight, kept on believing.

  She felt that for almost every baby that had passed through her care here, her heart breaking fresh again with each one taken away, sent back home, reclaimed from her temporary care. Each one a new devastation.

  Those were the emotions swirling in chaotic mix through her mind and soul.

  Love, care, jealousy, possessiveness, and the smallest taste of spiteful arrogance. Clearly, she could do a better job of caring for these babies.

  Far away, a new sun dawned, hanging low in the sky over the center of the city on who’s outskirts the hospital perched. The shockwave passed in seconds, almost without being noticed.

  Almost in symphony, the twenty or so babies began wailing. Not from the sound of the explosion, for that had gone unheard even by the unnamed nurse, but because, in almost perfect unison, their eardrums had ruptured.

  The nurse, far more aware than the babies and thus far less observant, had been more puzzled.

  For a brief second, she had wondered what the sensation in her ears had been.

  That was the last thought.

  A wave of… something washed her existence out.

  Uncolored color,

  Unhearable music,

  Incalculable energy,

  Incomprehensible Change.

  An eternity or a second later, something opened its eyes, hanging spread out in a long, thin streak of presence, smeared through the fabric of reality, trailing away from the epicenter of the unexplained explosion.

  Or… no. It hadn’t opened its eyes for it had no eyes.

  It didn’t, or couldn’t, question that.

  For another eternity or singular second, it only hung, unmoving.

  Then its awareness began to move.

  Sorting, searching.

  Shuffling unconsciously past the millions of dead and shattered and broken bodies.

  Searching for signs of life. Searching for survivors. Burning itself, the very fabric of its own existence, in sometimes futile, sometimes successful attempts. Trying to force the few living bodies it could find to Breathe; to live; to continue... to Survive.

  Always, a part of its awareness was faced backwards, watching fifteen or so tiny, subtly thrumming heartbeats it could somehow feel even from the farthest distances.

  Days later, searching through the ruined pile of rubble left from some hospital or other, rescue workers were shocked by an unexpected sight.

  There, amidst all the ruins and death, fifteen pristine, alive, and somehow happy babies.

  A miracle, it was called. The babies that survived.

  The word spread slowly at first, then rapidly, then died beneath the greater wave of tragic and terrible news, swamped out by obituaries and death notices.