Here's the promised excerpt -- well, first excerpt -- from my new novel Donation, officially to be released on June 1st but already available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.
You can see what leads up to this point in the Amazon preview, which includes the Prologue and the beginning of Chapter 1 (almost to where this excerpt picks up).
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Whatever she had expected, this wasn’t it. Toni started to relax as she stepped through the doors and smelled something almost like fresh air. The light had the quality of sunlight; the walls were painted in light pastel colors. The small waiting room just inside the door had flowering plants, or maybe very good artificial ones, in the window sills. And the young male receptionist had blue hair. She might try that color when she got tired of pink.
She had thought they would take her right away to wherever the procedure would be performed, but instead the receptionist called over another young man to give her a tour. Not that the facility was all that large, as it turned out: a short wide corridor with large abstract photographs, streaks and blobs of fuzzy colored light; a larger waiting room with upholstered armchairs, and tablets for anyone who hadn’t brought one; more of the roomy and well-lighted corridors; and finally, up an elevator to a large room full of incubators. They were smooth cylinders with rounded edges, more than twice as long as a typical full-grown baby, and about two-thirds as high as they were long. She’d expected metal, but they looked more like plastic, their colors like the colors of the walls except a little richer. Each one had a couple of hoses attached, and a control panel with lights twinkling like overactive fireflies. Toni bit her lip and asked, “What if the power goes out?”
“Each incubator has a fully charged backup battery that can last for days, and we have three generators, all inspected weekly. Nothing’s going to happen to these little darlings. They’re safer than any of us, or any child a woman is carrying around. And by the way, we don’t just leave them sitting in one position all the time. The inner chamber is programmed to reproduce all sorts of movements a fetus would experience . . . otherwise.”
Toni had never thought about the details of reproducing a uterine environment. Was it comforting or chilling to think of a machine mimicking the movements she would have made, carrying the developing fetus through the day, lying down with it at night? Both, maybe.
Her guide opened the door to the room so she could hear the music playing inside. “Classical guitar right now, but we play all sorts of instrumental music, and some choral, and some pop. Nothing jangly or loud — we alternate soothing and upbeat.” He closed the door again and turned toward her. “Ready to get this done?”
There must be something else to see first. “What about the delivery rooms, and wherever the parents — the adoptive parents — get the babies?”
“I’m sorry, but that isn’t part of the tour. I’ll take you to the procedure room, then, shall I?”
She bit her trembling lower lip and nodded.
It smelled different here, more like what she had expected — almost aggressively clean.
The nurse who came in and gave her a gown — cloth, not paper, with crude flower shapes on it — also told her to take off her phone patch, for no obvious reason. If it could withstand wood dust, saw vibrations, and sweat, it should be close enough to indestructible. But maybe it interfered with the equipment somehow. She peeled off the patch and felt even more naked. She pulled the gown over her head.
The nurse might have thought she needed reassurance, or she might make the same speech to everyone who came in. “You came here in plenty of time — the incision will be quite small. And it shouldn’t hurt a bit. Later on, you will have some soreness, but we’ll provide you with medication for it. We won’t even have to put you out. We just spray your back, there —” She pointed near Toni’s spine. “— and you’ll start to feel very relaxed and comfortable.” She pointed next to a monitor nearby. “You can watch, but most of our visitors choose to watch the ceiling instead. The controller’s right there.” The ceiling had a large screen, currently showing a series of nature photos. Some included animals, but none, Toni noticed, showed puppies or kittens or cubs.
“You already know that today’s services are free, right? And if you want one of the latest birth control implants, that’s free as well.”
Toni ground her teeth before she answered, “The shot I got doesn’t always work — I found that out. These implants are more foolproof?”
“Just about 100 percent. And if you get the shot also, I don’t know of anyone who’s conceived after both. And you can get the implant removed any time — though you’d have to pay a doctor for that — and get medicine to counteract the shot for good measure.”
And that was apparently all there was to it. The nurse handed her a tablet. “You’ll need to put your thumbprint at the bottom of the screen before the doctor gets started. The technicalities, you know.” She slid out the door, leaving Toni to make her way through the stilted and confusing language. She would be giving up any “parental rights,” whatever those were. That made sense. She was giving up being a parent — letting someone else, better able to do the job, raise her baby.
Her baby, except that by the time it was a baby, it would no longer be hers.
Maybe this was why they had people change into gowns. So they wouldn’t yield to any last-minute urge to run out the door.
The nurse came back in, one hand out to receive the tablet, a hypno-spray in the other. No going back now.
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I'll finish up with another image of the terrific cover from KAM Design.
At least one more excerpt to come!
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