She Grabbed My Collar
Birth details.
Weight at delivery.
The diagnosis, confirmed on day four.
The clinical, careful, dispassionate language of a system describing a human being in the only terms it knows how to use.
And then I turned to the second page, and I read something there, and I stopped, and I read it again, because I did not believe it the first time.
I read it a second time to be sure my eyes were not inventing it out of the strange emotional weather of that morning.