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Georgia
by Shi Y, Arizona, USA, Age 16

I feel no pain as I step into the taxi waiting to take me home. I am numb to my senses, the shock of sin mercifully erasing my memory. I am lost, confused; I do not know what happened, yet I can sense a great evil, and I know I am solely responsible. I remember the Holocaust, and I wonder if I could be Hitler, but laugh as I imagine myself with a little black moustache. What an absurd thought…I cannot seem to stop laughing, and the driver asks me if I am alright. I cannot find breath to answer, but it does not matter--I am home.

I open the door and am surprised to hear my mother and father talking in the living room. The clock reads 12:51. Do they know what I have done? I do not want them to see me for I am eager to go to bed, so I sneak up the stairs silently. I am soon in bed, and I succumb happily to the sweet embrace of sleep.
...And I wake with the kiss of death upon my lips, and I scream, as if that will save me, for I have remembered.

I am a murderer.

My hands are trembling. I must clean them. I run to the bathroom, past my mother reaching out for me, and desperately scrub them. I do not know why the water is running clearly to the drain--can it not cleanse the blood from my hands?

My mother screams for me to stop, but I cannot. I am crying now, and my own blood drips into the basin, but my hands are not clean and I must keep scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubb...

She grabs my hands and pulls me towards her. She tells me it will be okay, that everything will be okay, but I do not believe her. She hugs me to her breast as if I am a small child and I sob into her shirt, but I know she cannot help me. I am alone.

It's been a year since I had the abortion. I know now it was the only choice I had, but that does not lessen the pain I feel when I see other women with their children. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I had given birth to my dear Georgia--for that is what I would have named her--but these are only foolish dreams, and do not take the place of reality. I betrayed the very thing that depended on me for its life, and now I must live with that truth instead of a daughter.