Бесплатный фрагмент - Music is inside us

An usual early morning. An usual small town. But there is a perinatal centre, a good one for such a small town. So, in this high-riser on one of the floors in one of the rooms there lived three pregnant women. All three were heavily pregnant. The room was commodious, and even three beds they slept in didn`t take up much space. It was light in the room, the sunlight was coming through a big window. Near the window there was a small table. On the table there were placed a flower in a pot, a small plasma TV and an old receiving set. All three expectant mothers were still sleeping.

A shoot of sunlight fell on one of them, the one whose bed was the nearest to the window. She woke up, then stood up. She was a young woman of medium height. Her husband was a professional basketball player. This was his job, he earned a living by this business. He often went to other towns and cities to competitions.

The woman came to the window and decided to open it, but not wide. She fixed the casement at the necessary level. Just yesterday her husband brought her a simple fixture in the form of an arc made of steel wire. From each side of this arc there were plastic suckers. She half-opened the casement. The woman stuck one sucker to the window glass and the other one — to the jamb. The casement had been fixed and some fresh morning air entered the room. The expectant mothers didn`t leave the window opened for the night in order to avoid draughts and wind noise that could make it close with a bang. After such a pleasant procedure the woman came to her bed and decided to get some more sleep. The street air was slowly creeping up on the second expectant mother. She woke up, opened her eyes and took a breath of the fresh morning air. She was a woman short in height. She stood up from her bed, stretched her arms above her head and took a step towards the window. Then she took several more steps and came to the table. She decided not to turn on the TV set, but to find a radio station. Her room neighbours were still sleeping and in order not to wake them she wore a pair of in-ear headphones and stuck the plug in the receiver socket. She turned the dial and had found a station. Rousing music was playing there. She liked the song so much that she smiled and began to sway body in time with the music. She had got carried away and one headphone fell out of her ear and dropped on the table near her round belly. The impact sound reminded her of her husband — a military officer. Rather of that how his boots clang while striding along a road. She took the headphone from the table and wore it. She began to dance again and felt that even the child inside her started to stir. It seemed to her the music from the receiver set was transmitted to her child. She smiled while thinking that the music was transmitted by way of the headphone and that it ran through the umbilical cord instead of food or it was transmitted when the headphone lay on the table and the child had received it like Bluetooth. But that just seemed to her and she smiled at the thought of that. She looked behind in order to see whether she had awaked her neighbours or not. No, they were still sleeping…

A nurse came into the room. By this time all three expectant mothers had already woken up. The third one was a young and a very tall woman. She was so tall that, when she sat on her bed, she was even taller than the second expectant mother of medium height, when she stood. The nurse examined the women, smiled and asked them to leave so that she could clear up the room. The nurse always did the cleaning at this time and the expectant mothers knew that. All the more so as their husbands waited for them in the hall every day at noon.