I
Trepidation [n.]: A feeling of alarm or dread.
The first time you came across this word was in your primary school classroom. Mrs. Essien, your English teacher, in her red koi-koi heels had written it on the blackboard, right next to its synonyms. She had enunciated the sounds repeatedly, tapping her stick on the board in time with each stressed syllable. The lecture that day was on Antonyms and Synonyms, and at the time, you couldn’t comprehend the need for multiple words that all broadly meant the same thing.
But right now, TRE-PI-DA-TION—complete with the cane raps—is the perfect fit for what you feel, and have felt, since your feet crossed the threshold of this place.
Not apprehension, nor anxiety. Just trepidation.
A feeling of alarm or dread is indeed a fitting definition for the frantic pounding of your heart against your ribcage, the tightening sensation in your chest and the paroxysmal tremors in your right eyelid.
But Osazé, ever so reassuring, ever so persuasive, leads you by the hand and practically marches you over to the rows of crude plywood benches in the little lobby.
“It’s cold feet, babe… just a thing of the mind, you have to conquer it,” he says as he clamps his sweaty palm around yours, flashing a charming smile meant to placate you.
II
Once seated, you look around the room, taking in the unpainted walls, the low ceiling full of dusty cobwebs and the equally dusty ceiling fan, and wonder how you have come to this point in your life. You, a student of a prestigious school, daughter to Deacon Edwin Owie of The Overcomers Assembly church and a two-time winner of the Edo State Scrabble Contest, compelled to visit a place like this. But in this very moment, you are neither of those things. Now you are a faceless statistic, having stripped away your identity at the door, adding yours to the invisible, cascading heap from the people before you; girls like you who walked through such doors, and came out missing a huge chunk of their essence.
The middle-aged woman sitting across from the two of you, at a desk littered with orange peels, barely acknowledges you. Her fair, almost reddish complexion is marred by dark splotches—a testament to a history of cosmetic abuse. It is to Osazé she beckons with jeweled, blotchy fingers. She is noisily sucking on an already spent orange, indifferent to the juice dribbling onto the desk. Her eyes stay fixed on the envelope he’s offering.
Above her, a gecko darts across the wall and vanishes into a crack, then peeks out again, watching. The woman opens the envelope, licks her index finger, then proceeds to count the money inside with the fluidity of one who has gone through the motions countless times before.
The movement strikes you as dubious. The deftness of her taloned fingers, the alertness in her eyes remind you of a shady drug-deal movie scene you vaguely remember. Her skepticism finally appeased, she spits out some orange seeds onto the table and leans in to speak to Osazé in a hushed tone. Her eyes flick to you occasionally, wearing the same look you give your kid brother when he forgets his Legos in your room, the kind you employ for minor annoyances.
You catch only one phrase from their hushed discourse: “Doctor is with another client now.”
Client, not patient.
You wonder if it’s because she’s uneducated, or just sly.
Then, a sharp scream tears through the hallway to your left, breaking the fragile composure you have managed to maintain. You fidget nervously, fighting the habitual urge to gnaw on your fingernails.
Spooked by the sound, the gecko ducks its head out of sight, its natural instinct for self-preservation taking precedence over its interest in you. You hope it will return soon, just to serve as a distraction from the grating sounds of the middle-aged woman, and the bleakness of the bare walls, and the mocking irony of the sign that hangs above the doorway, and what all these things are doing to your nerves.
III
Doctor Isaiah’s Clinical Services, the sign proclaims.
Next to the bold lettering is the caduceus, the winged rod wrapped by twin snakes. But from where you sit, the sign is crooked, and the snakes look…off.
You realize you saw no such sign outside. Nothing marked this place from the rows of identical, low-cost houses lining the street.
Osazé hurries back.
“We’re number thirty-four,” he says breathlessly, handing you a piece of paper with the numbers written on it. “She says it only takes a few minutes. Thirty at the most.”
You don’t say anything.
You haven’t spoken to him all morning.
“Babe?”
He’s watching you now, searching your face, trying to read your silence, but you keep your face impassive.
“Viv?”
You finally speak, your voice husky, unused.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
You stare pointedly at him.
“The scream Osazé—the scream. Did you hear the scream?”
“Yes. Yeah, I did,” he says, quickly. “She said it’s from a patient in her third trimester. Ours would be much easier and stress-free.”
But he won’t meet your gaze.
“Client, you mean,” you mutter.
“What?”
You shake your head and look away.
*****
Last night, you couldn’t sleep. So you stayed awake through the night asking Redditors about their abortion experiences. You watched your post grow into a thread, and then a trending hub where American feminists and radical right-wingers waged war over western abortion reforms and something called the Roe v. Wade ruling.
For a moment, your belabored mind became unfettered and forgot the tiny, plum-sized catalyst of your current chaos quietly growing inside you. You drifted, carried on the winds of freedom voiced by women oceans away, women bonded to you by the raw thread of shared experience. Their stories gave you strength. Their words, fierce and unapologetic, made you feel lighter. Justified. Empowered. But the moral reinforcements—the guilt-lifting validations that emboldened you—seem to have drained away now. Their words return in faint echoes, like the reverberations of a very long, empty tunnel.
BoredAlready commented:
warning for you when you get your first period afterwards. Nothing could have prepared me. It was like the scene in The Shining when the blood comes out of the elevator. Gory stuff.
TexanMamaBear commented:
Whatever you do, don’t kill that baby inside you. It’s going to get tough, yes. But honey, you will be grateful in the end. I know I am.
TwoXchromosomes replied:
TexanMamaBear, that’s the shittiest advice ever. Your mother should’ve swallowed instead.
ScienceMom81 commented:
I was 15. I don’t regret it, but I still think about the due date sometimes. Grief and relief can live in the same body.
AfroRapunzel commented:
This thread is full of murderers trying to make themselves feel better. You don’t need validation from sinners. You need Jesus.
TrollPatrol44 replied:
Genuinely curious. Why are your kind more upset over a clump of cells than over starving kids who already exist?
Hundreds of strangers spoke at once—offering mercy, menace, and medical detail—until the thread became a courtroom without a judge. And then there was Gothgal69, the only one who actually answered your question, with a ruthlessly clinical breakdown that left you unsettled.
They don’t let you look at the screen, at least not where I went. In retrospect, I like to see that as a kindness. The procedure began with a speculum to open me, then a tenaculum to hold the cervix steady. After the local anesthetic (lidocaine injected around the cervix) they used metal dilators to widen it.
For my gestational age, they used suction first, then forceps (the curved, stainless steel thingy) to remove remaining tissue. The doctor explained this part clinically: disarticulation of fetal parts. Limb by limb. A rib, an arm, then the skull.
Each removal followed by suction to clear the cavity. It was silent except for the suction machine.
Afterward, they checked the tray to confirm completeness. Nothing was said.
I was given a pad, a painkiller, and a paper with aftercare instructions.
That was it.
I’m telling you this because I think it’s what you want to hear. You want to know exactly what it is you’re getting into. What actually happens, the whole journey…
Well, Bon Voyage.
You had read her words with your hand resting over your belly, unsure whether you were comforting yourself or the life quietly forming inside you. That comment, more than any other, had stopped you. It wasn’t the gore or the careful omission of sensory pain. It was the clarity, the precision. The hint of emotional detachment.
There was something in her tone: the way she described stepping alone into something dark and walking through it. Not unscathed, but not destroyed either.
A part of you admired that. Or maybe envied it. Another part wondered if she was psychologically okay.
Her story exposed a latent truth: you are alone in this decision. The full weight of responsibility and consequence lay ultimately on your shoulders. Not even the strangers who had offered their truths—bleeding, bitter, raw, or sanitized—could carry this for you.
In the end, they tell you—a black girl tucked away in West Africa—that they are with you in spirit. They send you virtual hugs, love, and light. They enlighten you with the fact that “abortion” is too cruel a word; Planned Parenthood is softer, more humane.
They call you brave.
They call you a strong woman, lavishing the label like a garland.
But now, as you perch on a wooden bench in a dim, unfamiliar room, you feel it: The final shift in your metamorphosis from strong, independent woman to cowering little girl.
IV
Time is a sluggish creature in this place. It limps rather than walks, dragging its feet across the broken tiles and splintering itself on the edges of every minute.
Thirty minutes, Osazé had said. But your thighs are beginning to stick to the plywood bench, and the air, once simply stale, has thickened into something sour.
You glance again at the numbered slip in your hand.
34.
But it no longer looks like a number. It is a brand. A badge of irreversible decision. You trace it with your finger like a charm, willing it to lose its power.
From the hallway, a door creaks open and a girl steps out.
Her eyes are strangely fixed as though her spirit, confused about how to return to the body, decided instead to hover somewhere above her shoulder. There is a stillness to her, the kind that comes after a long, internal scream has exhausted all its breath.
You sit up straighter, your breath catching in your throat.
You recognize her.
That’s Cindy.
Cindy of the sculpted brows and designer handbags. Cindy who always sits in the second row of your Political Science class, legs crossed just so, as though posing for an invisible audience. Cindy who once got a lecturer to restart an entire lecture simply by raising her hand and saying, “Sir, I didn’t catch that.”
Cindy of the TikTok dances and curated confidence. Her face—sharp, smiling, sunlit—used to float to the top of your feed like a promise. Always in the company of Calista and Beauty, the inseparable trio who filmed everything from cafeteria rants to “hot takes” on campus gossip, framed in filters and background beats. Even professors seemed to orbit them.
But now, Cindy walks past you and trudges like a zombie towards the exit. She doesn’t look your way. Doesn’t look at anyone, really. Her eyes are wide and disturbingly still, like glass marbles left out in the rain. Her shoulders, once buoyant with laughter, now slump forward, defeated, her whole frame curling inward as if ashamed to take up space. Her presence, usually magnetic, now feels like the residue of a star that burned too brightly, too fast.
You want to call out her name, to ask Where are Calista and Beauty? Why are you here alone? But something in her expression tells you that she isn’t Cindy. Not right now.
Was it her scream you heard earlier?
Your fingers twitch toward your phone—muscle memory. But then, a realization stops you short: you haven’t seen a post from her in weeks. No “#OOTD,” no dance collabs, no sultry lip-syncs in lecture halls.
Just silence.
A silence that now feels deafening.
You stare straight ahead, heart thudding so loudly that you suspect the woman at the desk can hear it.
She is peeling another orange, her fingers slick with juice. Then she calls your number—not with menace, not with warmth, but with the same monotonic detachment as the flight announcements at Murtala Muhammed International Airport.
“Number thirty-four, Room 4.”
The sentence drops like a gavel.
You do not stand immediately. Your legs resist you, as if they too are grappling with moral consent. You reach for Osazé’s hand not out of affection, but to remind yourself that you are still tethered to something, someone. But his palm is now drier, his grip looser. He releases you before you fully rise.
You walk down the hallway, aware that the sound of your own footsteps feels like they don’t belong to you. The corridor seems to narrow, or perhaps your vision does, and the peeling paint on the walls begins to resemble flaking scabs. You pause outside the door marked with a fading IV, a Roman numeral that looks like it was drawn with a crayon.
You can hear the pounding in your chest as your heart rattles within your rib cage.
You raise your hand and deliver four timid raps haltingly. And from deep within your memory well, comes the voice of Mrs. Essien again in faint echoes.
TRE-PI-DA-TION! It means what?
A feeling of alarm or dread!
Louder!
A FEELING OF ALARM OR DREAD!
A voice from within the room says, “Come in.”
The knob turns easily in your hand.
The door does not creak. Doors only creak in horror movies. This one sighs.
You take a deep breath, hold it in, and step into the room.
V
Malaise [n.]: An indefinite feeling of uneasiness, or of being sick or ill at ease.
*****
Room IV is small and cramped; in the way a confession booth might feel if it were converted into an operating theater. The overhead fluorescent light flickers in a slow, intermittent blink, casting everything in alternating layers of pallor and shadow. The air is saturated with the smell of antiseptic that latches onto your nostrils.
The bone-colored tiles are mottled with faint stains. In one corner stands a metal trolley, its wheels rusty, stacked with a haphazard mess of tools: gleaming speculums, curved forceps, syringes in crinkled packaging. One of the forceps has a reddish-brown smear on it.
You tell yourself it’s iodine.
Your eyes are scanning rapidly now.
The examination table is covered with cracked leather—black, with sponge poking through in places. Its stirrups are too shiny, their polish recent, but unnaturally so, like a prop prepared in a rush. A single white sheet, tissue-thin and disposable, is draped over the surface. It rustles at your approach, like it’s waiting to be disturbed.
Above the table, affixed to the wall, is a faded chart of the female reproductive system. The colors—once bold pinks, reds, and purples—have dulled into washed-out flesh tones. Someone has scribbled in biro across the uterus: “GOD GIVES LIFE.” Below it, another hand has scrawled over that in angry black ink: “GOD FORGIVES TOO.”
A plastic bin sits beside the table, filled with used gloves, empty wrappers, a blood-speckled gauze poking from the top. The bin isn’t closed. Flies don’t buzz, though you feel they should. Or maybe they do, in your head. Flanking the bin is a bathroom door.
The window is slatted, covered with horizontal blinds that don’t shut fully. The sunlight that seeps through arrives in tired, dusty beams that slice through the room like disinterested witnesses. You can hear traffic outside—distant, careless honks, the city unaware of the choice you are about to make.
In one corner of the room, a sink drips stubbornly. The faucet ticks with each fall, like the seconds of your autonomy slowly running out.
Then the door clicks shut behind you. And you are alone with everything.
*****
“You should have worn a dress.”
The voice is gruff, laced with a hint of impatience. You turn toward the source and discover a man in scrubs sitting on a tall stool in the corner of the room. He regards you through a pair of thick, partly fogged spectacles that remind you of the bottoms of Coke bottles. In his hands is a stack of loose documents, already slipping apart.
You take in the sight of him, the man you are about to give unrestricted access to your uncharted womb. You notice the slight greying at his temples, the crow’s feet etched deeply into the skin that connects with long tribal marks on his cheeks.
No mustache. Not really a goatee, more like stubble.
So, this is Dr. California. The one whose code name is whispered among the popular girls on campus. The one with whom secrecy is assured, who asks no questions and expects none. The one whose contact information has been passed from hand to trembling hand so many times, among girls weighed down by secret dread. To know of him speaks of an admission into the fellowship of the savvy; to not know is to remain naive, untouched by initiation.
For some reason, you had pictured him younger.
Hip. Trendy.
You try to hide your disappointment at the sight of this furrow-browed uncle with cigarette-stained teeth.
He does not make any attempt to hide his own disapproval of you.
“You should have worn a dress,” he says again, his voice now thick with forced temperance. “Makes things quicker.”
“I wasn’t—I didn’t know—”
“Is this your first time?”
“Yes.”
“Next time ask questions.”
He reaches into a small drawer beside him and produces a folded hospital gown.
“Go into that bathroom and change into this, then come back here and lie down on the table.”
As you reach for the gown you notice the dirt under his fingernails, compacted into straight black lines as though they had been painted on.
*****
The bathroom is pungent with the smell of a different, cheaper sort of antiseptic. The same kind your grandmother favors, the kind she pours generously into the pit latrine back in your village home, as though trying to mask something older than the smell itself.
The white wall tiles don’t reach the ceiling. They stop abruptly at about five feet, giving way to bare, unpainted plaster—rough to the eye, like something abandoned.
The toilet squats low in the corner, its seat warped from age and heat. The bowl is off-white and ringed faintly with brown. A narrow cistern hangs above it, rust bleeding from the handle like a wound. Beside it sits a dented metal bucket and plastic scoop, positioned next to a cracked tile where the wall kisses the floor—a silent admission that the plumbing is unreliable at best. The floor is damp, though it’s unclear whether from a recent cleaning or something else. A bit of translucent soap clings to the sink’s edge like a mollusk, framed by the ghosts of long-evaporated water stains.
You slip out of your slippers and stand on them gingerly, careful not to let your skin touch the floor. The act of undressing—of peeling off your jean shorts and stretchy underwear—becomes herculean as you maneuver against the chill of the tiles, against the room itself, which seems to resist you with every surface.
Your thoughts drift, unbidden, to Osazé. You picture him still seated in the reception area, scrolling through his phone, probably checking football scores or watching reels. Maybe he’s laughing at something, something mindless and light, while you are in here, alone, bracing against the cold sting of tile and silence. A wave of anger blooms in your chest, sharp and immediate. It’s not entirely fair, and you know that. Not much time has passed since you left him, maybe fifteen minutes at most. But the unfairness isn’t about time. It’s about weight.
He gets to wait. You get to undress.
He gets to sit, fully clothed, untouched, unbothered while you crouch in this bathroom, tottering on tiptoes as you wrestle with denim and underwear, and the unsettling knowledge that your body is about to be entered by a man you didn’t know mere minutes ago.
He doesn’t have to second-guess the cleanliness of a surface before sitting. He doesn’t have to calculate what level of eye contact is safest. He doesn’t have to wonder what kind of man Dr. California becomes when the door is closed and there are no witnesses. He doesn’t have to wilt beneath judgement-laced statements like: “Next time ask questions.”
He doesn’t have to feel this shame. Not this specific, textured kind of shame.
And somehow, that makes it worse.
A sudden frustration takes hold of you—sharp and pointless, but all-consuming—and you reach for your phone with clammy fingers. The screen lights up, empty. No messages. No missed calls. You don’t even know what you expected.
You start typing.
He has dirty fingernails.
That’s all you write. You don’t add anything else. You don’t say what you’re feeling. You don’t ask him to come in. You just send that single line, clipped and cold.
But it carries everything. Your passive malice. The uncertainties that cloud your emotions. The lingering guilt that stays cradled at the core of unbiased reason.
Your own blame of self.
You recall, with begrudging clarity, the moment of conception in his dorm room, how he had begged to continue when the last condom ruptured but you said no.
Yet later that night, it was you who had climbed him, you who had taken him in your hand and then into yourself. And when he was done bucking and thrashing, it was you who rushed out to get the morning-after pill, a strange new kind you hadn’t used before, chosen simply for its availability in the absence of your preferred option.
With this recollection comes the familiar warm flush of shame, the same sensation you have grown accustomed to over the past few weeks. You drape the gown over your body and will yourself to ignore the cold drafts of air that sweep across your bare thighs as you open the door and walk back into the room. You are acutely conscious of the fact that you’re now naked and alone, in a room with a strange man.
You tell yourself that it doesn’t matter.
Not now.
VI
Dr. California—or Isaiah; you wonder which one he is today—is poring over the stack of papers in his hands. Without turning to you, he gestures to the examination table and you meekly climb onto it and lay down as though in offering. The ceiling here isn’t cluttered with spider webs like in the reception area, and you take a little comfort in that.
“Age?” comes the gruff voice.
“19.”
The room is quiet. Too quiet.
“Your scan results say you’re almost into your second trimester?”
“Yes sir.”
You offer no other explanations despite his quizzing look. You do not give him a breakdown of your long history of imbalanced hormones and unreliable menstrual cycles. How, because of these factors, a missed period had lost its significance for you over the years, allowing for a pregnancy to slip through, unnoticed.
Instead, you keep your sight fixated on a distinct mark on the ceiling. From your perspective, it has the semblance of a sparrow in mid-flight—the kind your brother once trapped in an old Bournvita tin, right up until it died and became food for a colony of ants.
The sounds of metallic jingles fill the room as Dr. California drags the trolley over to the examination table. Then comes the sound of running water, and finally, the snap of rubber gloves.
Your heart gives a lurch.
It’s time.
“Rest your legs on the stirrups,” he says.
You do as you’re told.
A barrage of thoughts stampedes through your mind: Should you have shaved? Are you musty down there? Does he have kids? A daughter your age, perhaps? Are they students of your school?
You feel a slight touch—a brush against your labia.
Goosebumps prickle all across your skin.
“Try to relax. Stop clenching.”
You shut your eyes and open them again.
At the edge of your peripheral vision, you notice some movement on the wall, but you ignore it and keep your eyes trained on the mark on the ceiling.
Another touch. This time, a firm swab—cold. Then the smell of isopropyl alcohol hits your nostrils.
Another swab, and then another. You flinch involuntarily.
“Stay still.”
“Okay,” you say, your voice small, muffled by the weight of suffocating shame.
You catch movement out of the corner of your eye again and turn your head to see. The gecko is back, but this time in the company of a much smaller, juvenile one. You crane your neck for a better look.
Yes.The gecko has a child.
Is this some sort of cosmic message from the universe—from God? Your father always said to look out for subtle hints of the divine, littered among the clutter of daily living.
Is this one of them?
You feel a sensation inside you—a movement, intrusive and unyielding. An instrument is being driven into you. Your vaginal walls begin expanding in submission to the forced invasion. You grit your teeth and struggle to bear the steadily growing pain as a stream of tears roll down your temples and into your ears.
The sounds of metallic objects colliding can be heard as Dr. California reaches for yet another tool. They are all in the trolley tray—all silver, cold and hard—the relics of unseen traumas and unspoken pains.
And then it truly dawns on you.
Those are the things—the terminators. The instruments he would use to mangle it to death. The tools with which he would lance your baby, rip it apart piece by piece and finally crush its skull.
Stop.
But the word dies at conception, stifled by a sudden, erratic sob.
The tissue along your vaginal walls is taut, mirroring your rigid anxiety.
“STOP!”
Your eyes are still on the gecko and its child as though drawing strength from their presence. The movement in your vagina halts and for what seems to you like a very long time, you stay in suspended animation, pried wide open.
When you eventually look down, you find him regarding you calmly.
“Stop. I have to—I want to go home.”
That’s not the way you would have preferred to say it. But it works well enough.
In one fluid motion, he retrieves his apparatus from within you and moves aside, a quiet indication that the procedure has been aborted and that you are free to leave.
You swing your legs down and snatch up your discarded clothes, forgetting to feel ashamed as you bare yourself in your haste to get covered. He watches you for a while, then stands and walks over to the sink.
“We don’t do refunds, I hope you understand.”
You don’t reply.
You finish dressing and scramble for the door. Your footfalls are muffled by the tears in your ears. They are streaming down freely now, and you don’t exactly know why. The echoes of the hallway as you run through it are loud with purpose, and you realize that you will remember them for a long time.
You whip out your phone and dial up your dad.
The reception is now occupied by three other girls, huddled together in silent solidarity. Your vision is blurry because of the film of tears, but you can still make out a startled Osazé, his face frozen in bewilderment as you whizz pass him.
You ignore him, and also the calls of the middle-aged woman as you burst through the door.
*****
Outside, the sun washes over your tear-streaked face as your father’s voice streams through the phone and into your jangled nerves, calming them into stillness.
“Hello Vivian,” says he.
The man who taught you love and truth.
The man who raised you on accountability and grace.
The one who named you.
Vivian — Latin origin: full of life. Alive. Life-giving.
And now, you understand what it means.
You press the phone more tightly to your ear as the ache in your chest begins to soften. Behind you, the door to the clinic closes, quiet and unremarkable. Around you, the world continues: keke horns blare, sunlight glints off zinc rooftops, someone calls out for water across the road.
Life, again.
You take a deep breath, and then a step.
You are going home.
*****
Intrepidity [n.]: Courage, bravery, dauntlessness.
*****
Image: Rosa Rafael Unsplash remixed