Braxton & Hicks never played Vaudeville for laughs.\u00a0 There was no curtain to this bloody show.\u00a0 We, the husbands, sat in the boardroom and waited for mothers to pee when the obstetrics nurse turned.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m glad we\u2019re alone,\u201d she said.\u00a0 She pulled out a tiny figurine of a silverback gorilla from her black bag.\u00a0 \u201cHe\u2019ll be waiting in the Labor Room for you,\u201d she said, rubbing the gorilla\u2019s head with her thumb.<\/p>\n
I sucked on a Life Saver the size of an undilated cervix. The nurse stared us into silence.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe knows all the secret problems between you two.\u00a0 Labor brings out more than just a baby.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I remember when that girl turned ape at the state fair.\u00a0 The witch doctor hexed her good in the tent.\u00a0 She fell into a trance under a red light and grew hairy and large.\u00a0 We chanted, \u201cGorilla, Gorilla, Gorilla, Gorilla, Gorilla,\u201d but the man with the bullhorn always looked worried, and she broke through the chains much too easily.\u00a0 \u201cRun, children!\u201d he screamed.\u00a0 The others made it out, but the gorilla was fast and blocked the only flap I could find.\u00a0 I saw the eye behind the eye twitch before it went black, before I went to the grass to cry.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cAt ten centimeters,\u201d the nurse said, after the mothers returned, \u201cyou\u2019ll be her stirrup.\u201d\u00a0 She lay on the floor.\u00a0 Her legs crawled on the air.\u00a0 She asked two men to man her calves.\u00a0 I felt the prickle of hair above her sock.<\/p>\n
\u201cGlottal breathing is not ladylike,\u201d she said, \u201cbut it\u2019ll get the baby out easier.\u201d\u00a0 She scrunched her face and grunted, pressing her heel harder into my palm.\u00a0 \u201cGrunt in cadence, ladies,\u201d she said.\u00a0 \u201cHoo, Hoo, Hoo, Hoo.\u201d\u00a0 The mothers mimicked the sound.<\/p>\n
Later, the husbands toured the cafeteria while the mothers sat and snacked.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere,\u201d the nurse said to us.\u00a0 She held up a bunch of bananas and pulled one off for each man.<\/p>\n
\u201cMake a wish,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
We each snapped the yellow stem, then peeled it back white.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At five, Porter\u2019s uncle told him if he didn\u2019t sleep with a toboggan cap on at night, his brain would fall out of his ear and he would die.\u00a0 For the rest of his life, Porter followed this advice, his foundational education too poor to disabuse him otherwise.\u00a0 He went to a mediocre parochial school in a mediocre Midwestern city full of bureaucrats and cattle, a place where fear was fertilized alongside symmetrical fields of soy.\u00a0 What if all those grammar school biology classes were wrong? he asks himself even now at night, a married man with kids. \u00a0After all the same man who taught him his last anatomy class was also saddled with teaching history, geography, math, and religion.\u00a0 This muscular little man named Mr. Zorn wore his hair in a tightly permed mullet and doused himself with Polo cologne every day.\u00a0 He ran his class with martinet precision, putting all of his notes on an overhead projector that the class dutifully copied into their own notebooks and promptly forgot despite Mr. Zorn\u2019s promptings to \u201cpour their brains out on the page\u201d during his exams.<\/p>\n
Mr. Zorn\u2019s pedagogy consisted of gesturing wildly to them as he spoke, much like a poor magician Porter once saw at a birthday party in a Burger King, who tried to cover the flaws in his tricks\u2019 presentation by flapping his cape more and more.\u00a0 Except Mr. Zorn did not have a cape, only a mullet, whose long rows of brown, chemically-curled hair glistened under the fluorescent lights, shaking and bouncing behind him, until at some point, lost in a trance, Porter saw all the hairs congealed into one, coiled mass on the back of Zorn\u2019s neck, as if in a greater feat of magic, Mr. Zorn\u2019s lecturing on the basal ganglia and the medulla oblongata somehow transformed his hair into the very organ he spoke of.\u00a0 But Porter knew Zorn was no sorcerer.\u00a0 No, never in all Mr. Zorn\u2019s attempts did he say (or spell) the word medulla correctly, usually opting for the more common Medusa-on-the-Grotto or Modular Obligation, or, sometimes, if too near a geography lesson, Mongolia Oblation.<\/p>\n
Barbed by such memories, for the next twenty years, Porter has worn the knit cap to bed, hiding it under his pillow from college roommates and occasional girlfriends alike and now his wife, who, unanchored by any cranial fears or grade school incantations, lets him check on his toddling son and daughter before Porter goes to bed every night and never asks why in his back pocket, he carries two knit caps or why when he brings them out of bed in the morning for their wake-up-mom kiss, their hair is full of fuzz like their father\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt must be genetics,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
He nods and says, \u201cI think so.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Braxton & Hicks never played Vaudeville for laughs.\u00a0 There was no curtain to this bloody show.\u00a0 We, the husbands, sat in the boardroom and waited for mothers to pee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":22034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-patrick-crerand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21465"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22035,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21465\/revisions\/22035"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}