Bavataka

Laurel tried to relax in the birthing pool, though her perfect Dragonspit Red fingernails stroked the red panic button on the handrail. She knew it would not be long before her pain would be more than she could tolerate without help. Determined to appear strong both now and when she would have to relinquish her baby to the family she had selected through the Chaparral Maternity and Adoption Agency Laurel gritted her glistening teeth and tried to concentrate on Terminator VI playing on the five-foot HDTV screen. I need to see this shit now? Another violent, brain-dead, pumped-up jockstrap saving the world once again. I d like to cop a scalpel before I get outta here, and go do a little damage on Cougar that would take the strut out of at least one sorry stud. Laurel knew it was the pain talking, but that did not explain all the hostility she felt.

When Laurel had told her boyfriend she was pregnant, Cougar offered to help pay for an abortion, but he made it clear that was as far as his commitment to her went. Laurel did not want her baby to have a professional body-piercer for a father anyway, even if she could overlook his scraggly mustache and tattoo of a cobra girdling his waist.

Laurel had waist-length black hair and was stunning if only a modest height of five, three -- with cheekbones and jaw line both fine and strong. She wanted to enter Vogue College of Cosmetology in the fall and eventually find a niche in the entertainment industry to work with celebrities. At least that was her dream, a way of escaping Albuquerque s War Zone, even if it meant putting her baby up for adoption. She refused to raise a child in the midst of violence and poverty, having seen enough struggling during her own recent childhood. Laurel would not consider an abortion when her boyfriend brought it up, or when her mother tried to convince her it was best. Her opposition was not based on religious conviction she simply felt love for her unborn child.

Laurel s fetus had been named Kelly Keene the last life around, but the adoptive parents would be naming this incarnation. The soul within Laurel s womb waiting to be born -- Baby Kelly -- could remember a former life as Kelly Keene in great detail, but vexingly, not how Kelly Keene had prematurely died. The missing details of such a uniquely pivotal event in the lessons of a soul engendered apprehension about being born again. And then there was the post-death trauma of reviewing, at God s behest, everything Kelly Keene had ever done, said, or even thought.

It was not a pretty picture. Kelly Keene had been a divorce lawyer, and his family law practice was taken, under his guidance, to the rarefied atmosphere of the top few firms in the country. Now, despite a surfeit of anxiety, Baby Kelly was eager to get to work on some serious soul redemption. I think I ll swear off all that church stuff this time. After all the time I invested in it, what good did it do me?

What the hell is that pressure on my head? With every brain-crushing contraction, Baby Kelly s past-life memory faded toward extinction.

Being born again seemed to be shaping up as both a blessing and a curse. It s nice to be somewhere, but here? I had bigger plans. Baby Kelly gazed at the pink walls of the womb and wondered how such an outrageous predicament could occur being abruptly dispatched from Earth, and then reborn, rather than going straight to Heaven and taking up permanent residence among the Divine Glitterati as Kelly Keene had always anticipated. Baby Kelly s musings seemed to occasion a response that was astounding to Laurel s impressionable fetus. On the amorphous womb wall a marquee of canary yellow floated across the field of pink announcing: "The Last Two Weeks of Kelly Keene s Half-Century on Earth."