by Madison Britt

I thought the first birth I would see would be that of my own child.

It wasn’t even human.

My paternal grandmother, affectionately dubbed “Grammy,” spent her retirement breeding and showing dogs. I was always helping out with the litters as a kid, spending hours playing with them so they were socialized and bottle-feeding them if they couldn’t drink their mother’s milk. But as I grew older and school took over, I helped less and less until my sophomore year of high school. I was fifteen and made mostly of angsty self-righteousness to make up for the bleeding heart I hid away. And Grammy was one of the few people I still felt soft and safe with.

So, when she called me one day to ask for a favor, I said yes before she could even get the words out.

“One of the dogs is getting ready to give birth—Wren, remember her?”

“Of course.”

“Right, good. Well, I don’t know if your dad told you, but I broke my arm this week. I’m fine now, but Wren is due the first week of next month, and I’m not supposed to get my cast off for another six weeks.” Her voice crackled over the line. We had always had bad service where we lived. It was a miracle the sound waves hadn’t turned fully robotic yet.

“I heard, I’m sorry. What do you need me to do?”

“Would you be willing to come down here and whelp the litter with me? I’ll tell you everything you need to do. I just need a spare pair of hands.”

My answer was still easy. “Of course.”

She called my dad the first Friday of that May and told him to bring me over—Wren was going into labor.

Everything after that was a frantic rush of throwing clothes in a bag, packing dinner in a Tupperware to eat in the truck, and yelling “goodbye” as we ran out the door. The drive there was the worst part. We were going too slowly for the beat of my heart. My mind was thirty minutes away.

When we finally arrived, I kissed my dad on the cheek and darted into the house. I found them in the laundry room. There was a red lawn chair in the corner, where I could imagine Grammy holding vigil over the small white terrier currently lying on her side amidst a sea of towels yellowed by viscous discharge.

Grammy stood from where she had been sitting on a stool on the other side of the room, slowly stroking the fur between Wren’s ears. She came over and wrapped me in a hug that, despite my being able to rest my chin on her head, made me feel like I was barely to her knee again.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispered into my shoulder.

“Me too.”

“Have a seat. It’s a waiting game now.”

I left the chair for Grammy and nestled criss-cross on the floor across from Wren’s swollen belly.

It only took about twenty minutes before she started straining to push.

Grammy pulled her chair closer to the pen and spoke calmly. “Okay, step in and kneel next to her. I’ll tell you what to do.”

Her instructions were a dim vibration in my ear as I watched the head begin to crown and realized there was more to birth than I had ever been told.

I didn’t know much about it. I had taken my school’s sex ed class at that point and understood the basics, but beyond the birds and the bees, I was clueless. All I had heard of personal accounts were my mother’s romanticized stories of how my brother and I were born. There’s a running joke in my family about my brother being so big he had to be “vacuumed out.” The stories about me are mostly centered around me in the weeks after. My mom never actually told me much about the actual birth, only that she asked for an epidural that time.

Now, as I become an adult, the details of birth feel like this restricted secret, like you can only know once you are already at its mercy.

But in that room, even the basics were not helpful.

In a dog’s birth, there is no placenta. Well, actually, there is, but it’s part of the sack that each puppy is born in, which was another surprise. Each puppy is encased in its own sack throughout the entirety of the birth. Often, it breaks as the pup comes out, broken by the pressure of the canal so that by the time the puppy is born, all that is left is a bit of pale, red-streaked sinew bunched up by the umbilical cord like a slimy fruit roll-up. Sometimes, though, the sack remains intact, and you have to break it manually, which is, of course, how the first one was born. Grammy gently took it from my cupped hands and cradled it in a towel across her lap. Using her broken wrist to stabilize it, she took her good hand and simply poked a hole with the tip of her scissors. It was exactly like a water balloon, one prick and it rippled apart, leaving everything to gush out.

Grammy took the corner of the towel and rubbed it over the pup’s nose and chest. Then she used something like a turkey baster to suction the mucus from its mouth. The puppy began squirming on its back, and she handed it back to me. “It’s a boy.”

I had held newborn puppies before, so I was not surprised by the size or the flat flaps of ears or the unopened eyes. But holding him there, small enough to fit in one palm, still wet and weak, the reality of what I was witnessing snapped into place.

The iron of blood in the air. The body in my hand. The incredible warmth of being inside his mother’s belly.

This was life. Mere moments ago, he had been in a world of his own, but now he was here in ours. He would hear and see and taste and smell and think and feel.

He was not autonomous now, but he would be soon.

Grammy plucked something like a white worm from the towel as she stood from her chair. The skin of the sack. She walked around to the other side of the pen and crouched in front of Wren’s muzzle. “Some people don’t, but I let them eat it. They want to on instinct. Who am I to decide they shouldn’t?”

Wren snatched the afterbirth from Grammy’s hand as though eager to have some piece of herself back. I heard the surprising crunch as she chewed, the rubbery substance snagging between her teeth like dental floss. It wasn’t the sound of something dry snapping, but like the slicing of frozen fruit, still somewhat soft but stitched together by ice crystals now breaking.

Grammy spoke up from where she was, again petting Wren’s head. “Set him down so he can latch. They need to eat right away.”

Wren didn’t whine or whimper or bark. She just panted. And as I placed the first pup, fresh-born and hungry, at her nipple, all she did was lean her head down and lick the amniotic fluid from his slick fur.

She was suffering, yet all she did was care for him. Clean him, feed him, comfort him. All of this. She would do all of this and anything for him.

It was the only moment I could ever remember doubting if what we were doing wasn’t wrong. If taking the puppies from her ten weeks from now was not as despicable as doing it to a human mother.

Grammy snapped me from my daze by handing me a pair of forceps and the long, slender scissors she used to break the sack. “Just cut about an inch away from the body. The rest will fall off later.” She didn’t need to clarify what she was referring to.

I clamped down on the umbilical cord, cut it with the shears, and—crunch—severed the connection.

Madison Britt completed her BA in English and Japanese at Old Dominion University and is now pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at the same institution, where her work received the Friends of Creative Writing Scholarship. While dabbling in all genres, her primary passion is fiction that focuses on social commentary. In the rare moments she’s not writing or reading, Madison can be found drinking concerning amounts of coffee, attempting to crochet, and trying to coax her cat off her bookshelves.