THE ANGEL by Armenida Qyqja

After asking the usual questions regarding the contractions, the nurse, young and probably fresh out of school, lifted the sheet over her knees to perform the preliminary examination. Her panic was clearly visible in her face.

“The head is crowned,” she said unnerved and without eye contact. Then she lowered the sheet again and ran outside for help.

“Doctor and staff in exam room number two!” echoed her call in the long hallway, together with her running steps.

Another woman was giving birth a few doors down, and her cries were mixing with other noises.

“Oh, what a horrible night! Do all the women of Tirana have to give birth tonight?” a tired, elderly nurse complained.

She heard this all while her condition became less and less tolerable each second.

“Help!” she exclaimed, not only from the pain but also from the fear of being left alone during such a difficult moment. Two nurses crammed into the room, lifted the sheet above her knees, and started their work. The previous nurse returned, carrying towels and supplies.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the elderly one with a mother’s love, “We’re here. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to you. Breathe, darling! Take a deep breath! And don't push until I tell you to!”

“Wait! Let’s get one of the shoulders out,” said the other nurse as she reached with one hand, supporting the baby’s head with her other.

She tried her best to follow their instructions but the baby was coming a lot faster and her pain was intolerable. Her cries filled the room and echoed in the long hallway where they mixed with the other women’s…a cry, then a piercing cry, a wail…oh no, she had no time to think about it. The other shoulder was coming out!

“There, just a little longer! Wait, don’t push anymore! You’ll tear and we would have to stitch you up. It takes longer to heal with stitches. Just slow down, darling!”

“I’m not pushing at all,” shouted the woman, trying to stay calm. “It’s coming by itself! I have no con….”

The new wave of contractions didn’t let her finish. Cries so loud came that felt as if they would break down the walls of the room, which was more like a corner in size than a room.

“There, there. Push now! A little more! The other shoulder is out too.”

Within a few minutes the baby was born and his first cry was heard. The pain stopped immediately and her lungs filled with air again. Impatient, she tried to stretch her head to see her baby.

“A boy!” exclaimed one of the nurses. The oldest one cut the umbilical cord and spoke the blessings she gave to newborns in her arms for almost thirty years as a midwife, “Long life, and luck!”

***

The child was healthy and beautiful, nearly four kilograms with chestnut hair and nice rosy cheeks. “A rare thing,” noted one of the nurses after saying Mashallah. They cleaned him with great care, wrapped him up and put him on her breast to feed.

The screams of the other women continued, and so did that cry… ”God forbid, maybe...” She held her newborn angel tight, scared to even think about it.

“That is enough,” said an unfamiliar nurse that came in after about ten minutes. “I have to take him to the baby's infirmary to sleep there.”

“Why can’t I keep him? Why can’t he sleep here with me?” said the young mother, puzzled, while holding her baby tightly in her arms.

“These are the rules for everyone. It’s better for you and the baby. You both get some rest. I’ll bring him back when it’s feeding time again,” the nurse explained while tugging at the baby.

Somehow she didn’t trust her. There was something in her eyes that seemed to be fleeing. Some kind of darkness in her voice. She wanted to hold her baby tight and never let him go.

“Please!” spoke the nurse in a much softer tone. The young mother finally let go of the baby. As he felt the separation from his mother’s breast, the baby let out a bitter cry. The echo would be heard not only in the hallway but also between the walls of her heart, for the rest of her life.

***

Worn out, she fell into a heavy, dark sleep with no dreams. At least that’s how she felt. She thought she had fallen into a black pit where her body smashed violently. She felt nothing, not even when her bed was dragged with her down the hallway. With great effort, she opened her heavy eyelids and through foggy eyes she saw another bed, only a little farther… “Where in hell am I? My son! Where is my son?” was the very first thought that struck her.

“My son. Bring me my son!” she called out using all her strength, but her voice was choked and weak. She couldn’t understand why she felt so heavy and desperate. Why did she feel so anxious? As if she had parted with her son for life! A painful cry from one of the rooms came as a response to her thoughts.

“Bring me my son,” she called out again and jumped to her feet. The world was suddenly spinning around her. A nurse rushed from one of the rooms. She held her and helped her sit down on the bed again.

“I want to go see my son. Please, help me get to him.”

“We will bring him to you. Lie down and rest some more,” said the nurse.

“No. I don’t want to lie down. I want to see my son,” she said firmly while attempting to stand again despite her dizziness.

Another nurse came in and tried to calm her, but the harder they tried the more alarmed she was. A bad feeling grew in her heart and her eyesight got darker and darker. A black shadow took over the hallway of the maternity hospital.

The head nurse came a little later and delivered horrible news. Her baby died in his sleep.

***

Twenty-seven newborn babies had died that night from a mysterious fatal infection and poor hospital sanitation. The childbirth screams stopped and they were replaced by heart piercing cries of postpartum mothers who wanted to hold their babies in their arms.

No one got to hold them a last time. No one was able to give their baby a last kiss, a farewell.

***

She was brought home heavily sedated. She slept and cried, and in her agony kept asking for her son. Strangely, her breast was dripping, despite the lack of stimulus from the baby and the deep sorrow which normally caused the interruption of lactation.

“Give me my son,” she repeated during her delirium. Perhaps, just like her mind her body had not separated from the baby. It kept waiting to breastfeed.

Doctors and old women visited the hapless new mother. They prepared herbal medicines and teas especially for her. Out of desperation they even tried incantations, but the loss of the son could not be healed with medications or old women’s spells. Closure might bandage her wounded soul but where was his little body, his grave?

Her husband and other family members sought to find out what the hospital did with those twenty-seven baby bodies. Where were they? In the hospital morgue, buried together in one common grave? They should be able to take them some flowers, say a few words. A mother should be allowed to cry on her child’s grave!

No real answer. The State was taking care of it. The State would bury them with special precautions due to the infectious disease but what kind of disease was this? Where did they get it and why didn’t the mothers have it? Where would they bury them? Instead of answers, they got words of condolence, a pat on the shoulder and a tactful ‘move on!’

***

That’s how the third, the seventh, the fortieth day, and the next six months passed. No one was able to find her son. They even searched for him in the other cemetery further out of the city, the cemetery of Sharra. They searched every inch of it, every single tomb, even in the section where children who died from terminal illness in hospitals were buried. They couldn’t find him.

A year after this horrible incident their leader had his first cardiac arrest, and a wave of rumors linking his illness with the death of the twenty-seven babies ignited. During such a time, searching for the body of one of those twenty-seven babies might be life-threatening.

****

The second pregnancy came to her by surprise nearly a year later. The thought that another creature wanted life terrorized her. How could she guarantee it? For days and nights she struggled to silence all the voices of fear, tried to be more positive for the sake of the baby growing inside her. Her body wasn’t much help. Nausea and vomiting wasted not only all the food she ate but also her energy. Instead of gaining, she was actually losing weight.

Until she felt the first kick that shook her fragile body while lying on the bed next to her husband.

Her husband placed his hand on her belly and felt a second kick.

“Strong boy!” he said, without hiding his excitement.

Strong. Yes, she needed a strong and agile boy, fast like the wind to escape death’s hands. In front of her eyes appeared the bare feet of a boy running in a valley, through sun’s light and the heavy shadows of the trees that seemed to engulf him. She followed those feet until they reached the bed of a river. There she saw the beautiful Thetis, holding her son by his heel while dipping him in the river of immortality. But even Thetis couldn’t save her son from death. With his own free will he had chosen the short but glorious life.

“Oh God, please take from my days and give my Achilles a very long life!” she said out loud, and the smile of the heavenly creature on the foamy water shone on her face like a radiant sun.

The next day, the nausea stopped and good health returned. The rosy colour that was missing for a long time returned to her cheeks. Little by little, even her voice got warmer.

But that didn’t mean she stopped looking for her lost son. She looked for him on earth and in the skies, silently. Every fallen feather, every cuckoo song, she thought was a sign. But upon considering it over and over, she dismissed the thought.

Her mind and her heart fought day after day. Neither of them gave in. If he had died, he would have become an angel. She was waiting for him to show himself to her. He had to!

But what if he hadn’t died? There was also a theory which came much later, after the Nineties. Wouldn’t it be even worse if it was true? If he had grown up without a mother, somewhere in a military camp, training as a soldier, secret agent, or as some kind of an experiment of that horrible dictatorship! What kind of a monstrous killing machine would he be? Her logic rejected this idea. There was no need to do such a thing. They could take children from the orphanage. No need for the re-enactment of the deaths of twenty-seven babies. No. This didn’t make sense at all. But not being able to locate twenty-seven graves didn’t make sense either.

The sign that she waited to see from her son never came. Neither did she get an answer from the institutions about the whereabouts of the twenty-seven graves.

Something else came. After the death of the dictator and the tremors that shook the system, what was only a whisper under the breath became a terrifying folktale. Not only those twenty-seven babies, but more, maybe sixty or a hundred, were sacrificed to keep the dictator alive forever.

***

In contrast with the fictional stories, these kinds of vampires died one by one, from North Korea to Albania, leaving behind a thick fog of horror, the cries of newborn babies mixed with wails of mothers who had just given birth coming endlessly. If it was true, “fresh blood therapy” only prolonged their lives but hadn’t cured them of diabetes and other diseases that came with it. They hadn’t been able to buy immortality.

True? Or fictional horror inspired by the thousand acts of ugly, inhumane tortures, starved and dead children buried on fences of internment camps? Twenty-seven babies dead in one night only gives rise to a lot of doubts, especially since none of the mothers got to hold or even see them.

How many times had she dreamed some kind of huge lab where devils were created, thousands of tubuli joined together and going somewhere up…but she could never see where. She would wake up horrified, breathless, drenched in sweat. The thoughts! The imagination! Of course the imagination! But where was her son’s grave?! She was going crazy.

They searched again with renewed hope that whatever had happened wasn’t going to remain a secret. The dictatorship had fallen. Why would the new government defend it?! Wouldn’t they be the first to put those heartless criminals in their graves? Shouldn’t they be opening the files, starting investigations and shining light on such monstrous crimes?

But to their disappointment all their searches came to a dead end again. There was no documentation of the release of the bodies from the hospital or their reception in the cemetery. Nothing. Well, destruction of the evidence after so long was understandable and even logical, but how come no witness could be found from the whole hospital? A doctor, a nurse, a janitor, anyone who could come forward and share what was missing from the archives?! How come no cemetery worker, grave digger, or guard came forward to tell where those tiny boxes with the human creatures inside them lay? Where were those people? Why did they remain silent?

***

Her knees were about to fail her. Her son held her tight to prevent her from falling. They arrived in the children’s section in the Sharra cemetery to look for him once more. Headlines about boxes with baby remains thrown around irresponsibly because someone had come across them accidentally while digging without permission had recently spread across the media. Maybe they would find some writing, a tombstone, anything that marked the resting place.

Her son tried desperately to convince her not to come, and instead let him go first to see if he could find something. Only then would they go together. But she didn’t listen. Her hope rose again and she couldn’t wait a minute sooner.

A thin and ragged boy, about twelve-years-old who earned his living washing the tombs, left his water jugs and cloth at the floral stand to accompany them to the site.

“Here, grandma! That is the place!” said the boy, pointing to an area where the ground looked disturbed and was covered again without much care. The garbage poking through the unleveled soil was a clear testimony.

“Here, there was a big pit about a week ago. There were open boxes with bones,” said the boy. His face changed as he remembered what his big eyes had seen.

They were late. After the alarm sounded in the media they had been moved, sent off somewhere. Tracing them wouldn’t be easy.

“Did you see them, son?” she asked apologetically. “What a horrible sight for a child’s eyes!” she thought but she had to ask him. Whom else could she ask? So far no one offered any information. All the others they asked shrugged their shoulders.

“Yes, they were uncovered here for about a week until they were on the news.”

“Did you see a very small box?” she asked, showing the size with her arms. The boy looked at her with great sorrow.

“No. I think they were bigger. But I can’t be sure as it was all a mishmash.”

Remorse followed his words immediately. But it was too late. With downcast eyes, he bit his lips. It wasn’t nice of him to say those words. No one would like to hear that the bones of their loved one were thrown around. ”I’m so stupid,” he scolded himself, full of guilt.

“Give the boy some money!” she said to her son after collecting herself. It wasn’t his fault after all. Poor thing! Wasn’t he a son to a mother too?!

Her son released her arm and pulled some paper money out of his pants pocket.

“No, no! For God’s sake, no,” said the boy shyly as he stumbled backwards.

“Why not? Take it! You did your part, you brought us here. That was your job today,” said the man, holding out an old five thousand lek bill.

“No, I will not! God in heaven will strike me down if I take money from a mother who doesn’t know where her son is.”

The boy’s words landed like bullets in her chest. She never mentioned that she was searching for her son. How did he know that the child they were looking for was a boy? Coincidence? Or the subconscious perhaps speaking through this little boy?

She fell on her knees and caressed his pale cheeks. Malnutrition had left its marks in his young face and she felt her heart tremble with sympathy.

“Aren’t you afraid my son, every day among death and tombs?”

“Sometimes I am…” said the boy, shrugging his shoulders. “But not here at the children’s section.” He continued, “There are no ghosts or devils here. There are only angels, big ones and little ones. They protect me because I wash their tombs and make them shine like mirrors, and I put flowers on them.”

A smile lit his face as he spoke. His eyes followed something behind her shoulders and then suddenly they lit up like the sun. She turned her head but only saw a gleam, almost as high as a person, reflecting backwards from the marble of a nearby tomb.

“My little angel,” she exclaimed, and a tear slipped from her eye onto her wrinkled cheek. Her son finally gave the sign she looked for all these years. Now she could go in peace when her time came. Surely he would be there, waiting for her on the other side.

Armenida Qyqja was born in Tirana, Albania in 1977 and immigrated to Canada in 1995. She is the author of eight poetry books and two books of short stories. Her most recent book is Golden Armor, a poetry collection published by Transcendent Zero Press (Texas, USA 2025).

Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote Journal, and several other publications. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and books including Salt and Sorrow. He placed in the top 100 for the erbacce prize in 2021 and 2023, and was a finalist in Adelaide Literary Journal’s first short fiction contest. He was longlisted for the Rahim Karim World Prize in 2022 and given the honor of Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace that same year. He hosts the popular interview series World Inkers Network on YouTube and co-founded World Inkers Printing and Publishing.