She had run away, because, really, no one wanted to live in a town where whispers sailed faster than wind, and where stares could wound as fatally as a knife.

She got got on the greyhound bus to find a new world in Tennessee, she wanted to be a country singer, to make it real big, leave boring old Alabama behind.

She had wore that dress, the one with little cherries on the collar, because her momma had bought her two years ago, when she was fatter, before she lost all the weight, and so, now she had lots of extra weight again, it was the only thing that fit her.

She opened the window, letting in some cool air, allowing it to caress over her face, blowing whispers into her hears and moving her soft brown curls away from her face. She thought she had been to the toilet in her panties. She cried and the lady next to her turned and asked what was wrong.

They were stuck in traffic, the lady had soon realised. Now she was led on the floor, her cherry dress pulled up over her thighs, whilst the lady repeatedly told her to breath, and another lady, who said she was a nurses aide, looked inside her.

She cried some more, because really, this pain hurt more than she had ever imagined. Yet it wasn’t like she had seen on the movies, she didn’t scream as much as clench her teeth real tight and grunt every time she got a pain.

She hadn’t fallen in love before, sure, she had liked Tommy Farrell a lot and they had kissed behind the sheds at school and he had taken her to his daddy’s barn where they had kissed some more and he had unbuttoned her jeans. That was when she could fit into jeans. But she fell in love now.

She felt a pain down below and then a hard pressure, then something cried and the lady who said she was a nurses aide smiled at her and said it’s a girl, and the lady who had seen her cry and realised she hadn’t wet her pants kissed her forehead and told her she’d done a good job.

They placed a small, red, slippy, crying baby into her arms and she cried a little, cause she’d never had anything to call her own and now she had this little girl all of her own. Really she just wanted to sleep, but she was crying really hard now, because her baby had the sweetest little eyes.

She saw red lights flashing, and the lady who said she was a nurses aide said at last, the ambulance took a little too long, and the other lady said that the lady had done a good job, delivering a baby on the back of a greyhound bus. The lady who said she was a nurses aide grinned and said she might just train as a nurse now, and deliver babies all day long.

She got strapped to a stretcher, but she wasn’t hurt, her little girl was asleep, and she could see the cherries on her collar when she moved her head to look at her baby in the man who was checking her’s arms, and she decided she’d call her little girl cherry. Because Greyhound sounded silly.