The first report took longer than it should have because I kept stopping at the same line.
Two infant twins located inside taped cardboard box on highway shoulder.
There are sentences no person should ever have to write.
That was one of them.
By late afternoon, we had a case number.
By early evening, the hospital confirmed both babies were alive.
Critical, overheated, dehydrated, but alive.
Alive was the word I held onto because there were not many good words that day.
My supervisor came to my desk around 6:20 p.m. with a copy of the photographed note.
He set it down in front of me.
The paper looked worse under office lights.
More fragile.
More desperate.
The first sentence was the one that had turned the desert cold inside me.
They had been hidden.
The second was the one I could not shake.
Please don’t take them back to him.
