Introduction to an as yet undetermined story line

Jessie opened the envelope and a jumble of photographs tumbled out. Square images from a box brownie, black and white. A white-blonde head stood out in all the images, staring seriously at her. From the sandpit. From the blanket spread on the lawn. From the unfathomably high back of a thoroughbred horse. The same small face. The same hint of a frown.

That same frown was on Jessie's face as she turned over the envelope, trying to guess at who might have sent it. Any hints from the handwriting. It all seemed unfamiliar.

A photo drifted to the table top. Smaller than the others, it had been caught behind the photo she was holding. All the others were familiar, like old memories, forgotten, and now suddenly sharply brought back. From an old long-lost family album. A lifetime ago.

This small photo caught her by surprise though. It was in a small white card frame, oval, with small blue and pink flowers softly printed around the edge. A new born baby slept in the frame, a small fist curled up by the face. No hair, the skin was smooth and fair. The child's mouth was slightly pursed, as though pondering a question that didn't yet have an answer. However, it was the nose that was most recognisable. Unlike the snub noses that you would expect of a newborn, this nose seemed mature and formed. It gave the child's face a sense of agelessness. Jessie unconsciously lifted her fingertips to her own nose. There was no mistaking it. But who had held on to this photo, one she never even knew existed, for the past 35 years?

Jessie knew the story of her birth. She was her parent's first child. Born in the Mater Miseracordiae, when the nuns still had draconian rule, her father waited outside in the car park while her mother was ushered onto a trolley bed and wheeled into a corridor to wait for a room. As a nurse, her mother had no misconceptions of the realities of childbirth, but nothing prepared her for the lack of control, and the fear.

Left on her own in a corridor, Jessie's mother held on, willing a stop to the labour that had progressed far more quickly than the nuns had anticipated. The subsequent birth was difficult; forceps and stitches, and a lingering sense of betrayal that hardened her mother's mouth.
But as Jessie looked down on the tiny photo of herself, she saw no trace of the trauma she had gone through to make it into the world.

All she saw was perfection.