Ballad Of A Dead Soulja

The first sound Ava Reyes hears isn’t her own breath-it’s the thin, wet rattle of someone else’s panic coming through the phone speaker in the kitchen. The line hissed and crackled as if the world itself was trying to cut her loose.

“Stay with it,” the voice says, clipped and practiced, like calm is a uniform you can wear. “Ava-Ava, answer me. Is the baby coming?”

Ava presses her forehead to the cold cabinet door. The metal bites at her skin, and every contraction feels like a hand inside her ribs, turning until her teeth hum. The apartment smells wrong-bleach and old cooking oil, sweat trapped under cheap fabric, the sour fear of a place that has never held anything this human for this long. Outside, a thin rain taps the window like fingernails.

She tries to speak and only coughs. “He… he’s coming.”

The answering silence on the other end is worse than the voice. Then footsteps-real ones, not the phone’s-near the hallway. Her neighbor’s key scrapes in the lock. Ava doesn’t remember calling for help. She doesn’t remember anything except the way David’s last email read like distance could be managed if she kept her hands steady.

David Reyes deployed overseas. David Reyes promised he’d call when he could. David Reyes said he was safe, said he was doing what he had to do, said it was only temporary.

Only temporary. Only temporary. She can’t hold onto the words long enough to make them matter.

When the neighbor finds her, Ava is on the kitchen floor with the tile biting into her knees. The woman’s hands are warm but clumsy, and she keeps saying, “Oh God,” like God is a doctor who can be summoned by repetition. A damp towel is shoved into Ava’s grip. Someone’s radio chatters in the other room-muffled voices, a siren far away like a rumor.

“Ava,” the neighbor says, and her voice trembles. “Where’s your husband?”

Ava wants to laugh. It comes out as a strangled sound. “Over there.”

“Over where?”

Ava can’t answer without swallowing bile. She doesn’t know if she’s afraid of saying the country out loud or if she’s afraid the world will hear it and decide she deserves what’s coming.

The apartment clock ticks louder than it should. The rain keeps tapping. The phone keeps hissing.

The neighbor fumbles with the call button again, as if another attempt will rewind time. “He’s… she’s-” She turns to Ava, eyes wide. “What’s the name?”

Ava’s mouth is full of copper. She tastes it when she tries to breathe. “Noah,” she says, and the word feels like a prayer she doesn’t believe in, spoken anyway because her tongue needs something to do.

Her son arrives like a rupture. The air leaves her in a hard rush, and then there’s weight-warm, slippery weight-being pulled into her arms, into the world. A cry tears out of the room, sharp enough to cut through the rain. It isn’t a gentle sound. It’s a demand.

Ava sobs because relief is too big to fit inside her and fear is too familiar to leave.

The baby’s skin is slick and hot. He’s smaller than she pictured, all angles and frantic life, and his fists curl against her thumb like he’s trying to anchor himself. Ava presses her cheek to his head and inhales. He smells like milk and sweat and something metallic from the inside of her that won’t stop bleeding.

On the phone, the operator’s voice comes back, steadier now. “You’re doing it. Keep holding him. Keep breathing.”

Ava nods even though no one can see her. Her hands shake. The baby’s cry softens into hiccupping breaths. For a moment-just a moment-she lets herself believe she’s won something.

Then the neighbor’s phone buzzes on the counter, screen lighting up with a name Ava hasn’t seen on her own device in weeks. She doesn’t even reach for it. She knows the number the way you know a scar: by touch, by ache.

The message is short. David Reyes deployed overseas. David Reyes can’t be reached right now. David Reyes is in the thick of it.

Ava reads it once, then again, and the second time the words don’t stack correctly in her head. The distance stops being a problem and becomes a verdict. She feels it settle into her bones like cold.

The hospital, when it comes, is all fluorescent glare and the smell of disinfectant burning the back of her throat. Ava’s sheets are pulled tight, her wrists too light, her body too heavy. Nurses move around her with practiced efficiency, but their faces never fully hide the curiosity. Everyone wants to look at the miracle, the proof of survival, and Ava can’t decide if that makes her grateful or furious.

Her baby is whisked away for a check. Ava watches him go, his small legs kicking against a blanket as if he already understands the danger of being separated.

“Just a little longer,” a nurse says, and her voice is gentle in the way someone is gentle with an animal they’re about to restrain. “We’ll bring him back.”

Ava lies back and stares at the ceiling. It’s stained in a pattern that looks like constellations if you squint....