I remember at the time not really processing the magnitude of what I’d been told. That, I’d delegate to lack of sleep the night before. In the morning though it hit me like two fourteen ton sledgehammers had pinched my nipples. “What a dream!” my mind sung to me, you’d thought Helg was due for twelve children. Then I checked my phone again just to be sure. The sledgehammers collided.

The morning bagel – what is usually the pinnacle of my day – smeared through my existence like a foggy window and I don’t recall dressing myself or driving myself to Helg’s. But there before me sprung a melon door with its stem that was a doorbell. I jammed the stem a few times. A few more times. A few more times. My phone started ringing.

When I answered, the laconic melody of a lady’s voice came through to me and instantly got to work on my worries with its tranquilizing effect. Soft, confident voices have that effect on me. I melt like ice cream on a skillet. It was Helg. She was in the hospital.

I shifted from a primal erotic to primal guardian and little chemicals begged me to save this damsel in distress. Helg wasn’t a lady who needed saving, on the contrary she would be the one to disarm an adversary in a knife fight. But we are all intimately familiar with how little chemicals like to throw us about and this chemical was doing just that to me.

Becoming a primal guardian meant there was no room to be a poignant auditor, her words flew through me like a sieve cut for boulders. I only recall processing enough information to know what the problem was and where she was: “Ditrac Cross, Maternal Ward.” and “Labor.”

Cab drivers have an impressive disposition to know a person and their full package of ailments from a cursory glance in the rear view mirror. I remember this one’s powerful glance dissecting me all the way down to a father-to-be from a man who wasn’t ready to be.

Why I took the cab and didn’t drive instead I’m not sure, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Little chemicals seem to be impressively aware of their own shortcomings and will advect towards fail safes.

The ward major of the Maternal Ward at Ditrac Cross hospital was built from machine parts she was so efficiently ruthless. Perhaps that was why she had self-appointed her title as the “ward major.” Either I walked too slow, or spoke too slow, or walked too fast, or spoke to fast. But she eventually delivered me to the bed where Helg lay. I wanted to be upset, but someone had positioned her near a window and she was still a breathing Greek statue. I stammered, “Helga?”

She opened her eyes and said, “Hmm. You made it.” Those eyes looked up at me amusingly like I’d arrived to a party at four in the morning and the guests were already passed out drunk.

“Helg, are you alright?” I moved towards her and hooked her hand into mine. It was warm.

“It’s over.” she said. I was floored.

“Wha – uh. Wha – what? What. Over?” the little chemicals helped me out. I didn’t know this woman’s full address or the name of her pet lurcher and yet I felt heartbroken from having been broken up by a person I was never in a relationship with.

“The birth. It’s over.” she said. She looked past me then and I won’t forget that first motherly look that came across her face, the first of many I would come to see. Her attention was on whoever had come into the room – sorry, whomever had come into the room. I turned to follow her gaze and behind me were six nurses wielding sandbags under their arms like they were carving out the trenches. After a few more seconds my brain switched the categorization of these tan piles from sandbags to babies. Each nurse had two babies, bawling with wet red fat and faces aching like they’d just been dealt a three and a two in a game of blackjack.

More surprising than an army of nurses with an army of babies was an army of nurses unperturbed by their screaming sandbags. Helg was still locked in her maternal aura.

“Are – are these all Helg’s?” I asked the nurses, collectively.

One of them raised their eyebrows like she was scolding me for not also having a baby under each of my arms. “Sure is doll,” she said, “they’re all Helg’s.”

“But… twelve?” I said the number like the rest of the question was obvious from the context. A different nurse chuckled and her two babies wobbled with her.

“Hun,” the different nurse said, “first time here, huh?”

This is when my stupefied fatherly emotions got washed away by a sea of embarrassment. Had I misunderstood something?

“Uh, first time, yea,” I said.

A third nurse in the gaggle of nurses walked up to me and handed me her two babies and I took them. Two giant wet maggots with human faces; I loved them.

“Hun,” she also said, then put a hand on my shoulder, “these are all Helg’s.”

I looked at her confused and said, “yes, I know but – “

“No, hun,” she interrupted me with a smile of pity. She made a sweeping gesture with her arm as if to drape the entire ward in a blanket. She then repeat, “these are all Helg’s.”