It’s an
instinctive trait, the tongue’s restless want of sensation above its absence:
worrying toothcracks for the thick welts left along its moist flesh edge, and
the sounding of sweat running lengths from down the scalp for the taste of bay
rum therein.
This
then, the father to the child unborn, born now, born now upon this instant and
pulled heels over head up into the world, pulled from that again by this
father’s hand, the midwife falling back and out of focus from the blow that
allows him his son.
Mother:
Don’t... No, no...
her
head slack between high shoulders, still
thinking she has those two weeks yet before any of this will come to pass.
Mother:
Oh don’t...
with
her deflation relief creeping off from the slowmo panic she only just
understands to be filling up her newly-emptied belly, and nothing left her to
form any manner of relevant response beyond this sustained moaning and her eyes
begging something from their God, an ocular prayer before the lids descend. She
resigns herself to the consequences as if dreaming, the midwife also
stationary; the agonising momentum of her coccyx’ impact with the tiles having
shunted up through her spine, vertebra to vertebra, until finally damped and
halted in the muscles between her shoulders, afraid and ashamed at her
inability to fulfil her obligation to this newborn now being turned in the hand
of its father. The umbilical belts the infant waist as the man’s eyes crawl
across the entire surface of fresh wet skin, the features thick with chalky
mucus.
He
lays the child between his wife’s still-spread legs, this woman’s drowsy whine
perpetual as the sound of his bootsteps recedes and is gone, his presence
enduring over all in the potent reek of something akin to cloves, and a livid
blemish where the baby’s fatty calf curls into its foot at an angle that is now
wrong.
