Someone had left us a fruit basket. It sat slumped like it was embarrassed in the corner of the room, its aggressively curled ribbons demanding a joy we didn’t have. Neither of us had eaten in almost a day. It felt inappropriate to feel hunger in this place; our wants and needs should have been left at the door, scrubbed clean with the alcohol we rubbed into our hands at the entrance to the NICU. But we opened up the basket, not wanting to go outside. The cellophane crunched and crackled through the hospital hum. The raspberries had turned to jam, red flesh rotting in their pack.

Stop giving me things that have already gone bad, I thought.

The baby lay in her plastic house, tubes strung around her like a Christmas tree. Occasionally she turned towards us, mouth open, frantic. “It’s a reflex. She’s rooting for you,” the midwife said.

“I’m rooting for you too,” I whispered.

I thought of the champagne at our wedding. The lamb kebabs from the street cart that seemed dangerously pink. The room we fumigated before we knew I was pregnant. I wondered whether we kept receipts. We never thought to ask about the returns policy.

“We haven’t given her a name yet,” I said to him. “How will we find her if we don’t know her name?” All the names we’d picked out before seemed too precise, their edges too defined for this small, pink thing. She needed a name that would fill my whole mouth, a name that I could swallow. “Polly. Molly. Holly,” I tried.

My body still ebbs and flows with the tide of her hunger, her memory stitched into muscle and milk. I wonder if she is still searching for me, open-mouthed. A pain so sweet and rotten I can taste raspberry on my lips.

Sophie Stern is an Australian writer, living in Sydney with her husband and son. Her pieces have been published in Ellipsis and Yen Magazine, and she was longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2019. You can find her on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/sophieestern