Ten Centimetres

10 Centimetres
A Comedy
By Mark Nash
For my little 10 month old brother Jack, all my love

Mike might has well have fallen asleep. Trying to stay awake and pay
attention to Professor Reitmann dither on about the Missouri Compromise
and its importance in relation to American Jews wasn't helping him keep
his priorities straight. After all, his wife was in labour.
Her water had broken last night. He stayed up into the wee hours of
the morning trying to make Andrea fell that his presence really did
have any impact on the birth of his daughter. A pretty dumb decision
for a twenty-year-old child genius who had to wake up at 6 o'clock ante
meridium to get to his college class at North Central College.
In hindsight, it also was probably pretty stupid to get married at
nineteen, have sex with your wife like you have a score to settle with
The Deity Himself, ruin your wife's chances at a lucrative medical
career by getting her pregnant, and then go on pursuing your Master's
Degrees in American History and English Literature like nothing
happened. But his wife never complained, and his parents never talked
to him anyway, and his grades were still quite admirable, so no one
really got screwed to that end (well, one could speak differently on
Andrea's behalf).
But in the past month or so, Mike had been out of class almost as
often as he had been in class. Andrea contracted pneumonia that had
been brought upon -and made worse- by a history of asthma. The girl who
had been homecoming queen at Riverview High School in Sarasota,
Florida, who gave up her life, her hopes and her dreams, for a slightly
antisocial and very introverted scholar-athlete with a 4.65 GPA and a
nickname of "Webster", had now became a bloated, wheezing, mucous
hawking vegetable.
The gorgeous and delightful creature who shunned dumb jocks, Emos, and
sexy Arab sympathy cases for a semi-dork now looked like Mussolini with
a stuffy nose and shoulder-length blonde hair, blood-shot eyes, serious
insomnia, and breasts that had grown to DD cup, but looked B cup when
sized up to her massive midsection. Her many admirers would have
reached for a bucket to vomit in upon seeing her, if all of the buckets
weren't already in use for Andrea herself. Her doctor said Mylanta, but
her body said "BARF!", or "FART!". It had been a blessing in disguise
that her water broke; sleeping next to a person who made sounds
comparable to a cow serving its own predigested mid-morning snacks
could get pretty annoying.
Yet through it all, he still loved her. Mike loved that girl as much
now as he did when they shared that first kiss sophomore year, on that
hot, rainy Friday night in October, the night Riverview won the
District Championship, laying her on the top of her father's car,
soaked in the Florida precipitation, illuminated by the lights of the
Ram Bowl, the JROTC cannon firing&;#8230;he still felt that way
about her. Andrea was just as beautiful to Mike now as she was that
night, bloated monster that she was.
But, God, now she was suffering again, and this time it wasn't the
asthma that made her suffer. Little Annie just liked her humble abode
so much that se was willing to put her mother through hell just so long
as she could stay inside, where it was warm, and cozy, and where she
could still suck out every living ounce of energy Mommy had in her
body. Even if Andrea's stomach blew up into a sinuous, tangled mass of
digestive and intestinal tissues, Annie would be perfectly content with
staying home. Hard to believe that an illiterate, tone-deaf, parasitic
baby could hold her mother's life hostage-
Suddenly, Mike's phone rang. The entire auditorium fell silent, and
Prof Reitmann glared at Mike annoyedly as he checked who was calling.
It was one of Andrea's high school pals whom she picked to be the
godmother (Mike's pick for godfather was of training in an undisclosed
located for an undisclosed military unit for an undisclosed military
operation; Mike was in the in-crowd on that sort of thing).
"Hello," Mike whispered gruffly, in a way that everybody in the
auditorium could hear anyway.
"Mike, Andrea's ten centimetres."
"And why the hell does that mean anything to me?"
"Well it should mean something to you! The doctors are getting ready to
have her start pushing!"
The dots all started to connect, but not until after he muttered "Piss
off, lady," and hung up; he'd only had two hours of sleep, after all.
He remembered what that ten centimetre thing was all about, and what
pushing meant, and he screamed&;#8230;
"O my God, I'm gonna be a Dad!"

"Dammit!" he yelled at his car window, his car keys cackling at him
behind the locked door. He started to think. Where's the
hospital&;#8230;about a half mile, okay. What's my personal
best&;#8230;1:51.86? Let's top that, he thought. He started his
stopwatch and hauled it down to the Naperville General
Hospital&;#8230;
Approximately 1 minute, 50 seconds flat later, not counting .24 second
hand time penalty&;#8230;
Mike almost barreled through the glass sliding doors upon entering the
hospital, rudely ignoring the parking valet. He started picking out
random corridors and lifts before finally finding the maternity ward.
He came up to the elderly lady at the desk with a mole that would make
Cloris Leachman gorgeous and asked "Where can I find my wife Andrea,
the college girl?" The lady just stared at him and replied,
"You're gonna need to do better than that, son. We've got lots of
pregnant college girls here."
"Well do you got any Andreas in here right now? It's the day shift, you
know nothing happens during the day. Don't you ever watch TLC?" Mike
asked, panting like a hog. Finally he just divulged his last name to
make the process easier to handle. Just as he started to head towards
LD Room 3, a female hand smacked him right across the face.
"Asshole! What were you thinking, talking to me like that!" Andrea's
little friend whined at him, but once he started running down the
corridor, the adrenaline started pumping, and he soon forgot she was
running after him.
Upon entering the delivery room a team of doctors jumped at the sight
of a kid drenched in sweat and looking completely stoned barging in on
a delicate operation. Before the lead nurse began to tell him that he
needed to get scrubs on and be properly washed, he heard the
obstetrician say "Nurse, we need to do a Caesarean, stat!", Mike
fainted and fell to the floor&;#8230;
Mike felt himself being wheeled down a corridor when he came to.
"Michael, Michael&;#8230;" it was Andrea's little friend again.
"Michael, are you awake?"
"Yeah, yeah," he replied, and as he looked up he saw a large nursery
full of little babies.
"Do you see the first one on the left, in the pink?"
"Yes."
"That's your little girl."
She weighed 6 pounds, 11.5 ounces, pretty small, but still very
healthy. Right now she was sleeping, having just been breastfed by
Mommy, and she looked positively beautiful.
Annie appeared a little jaundiced, but not sickly. She had a thick head
of curly blonde hair, with perfect little ears, sweet little lips,
surprisingly puffy cheeks for her size, and they looked so kissable
from behind the window&;#8230;
"Hi, there honey, how you doin'?" Mike whispered. He then asked
Andrea's little friend, "Can I see her?"
"Sure," she said.

He sat down with her and just looked at her. So beautiful, she looks
just like her Mom, she'll be so pretty, and she'll be smart, she'll
love her parents&;#8230;O my God, I love you so much, Annie, I'll
never stop loving you. Thank you, God, for my little girl. And he sat
there for another half an hour, tears rolling down his face, so happy,
now that he had two gorgeous women in his life&;#8230;