I had just become a father, or, rather, had a child to carry around as empirical proof of my paternity as, technically speaking, I had become a father some nine months earlier when the little bundle of joy was conceived, which happened, to the best of our knowledge, after one of the boisterous “boy’s night out” events I’ve taken to arranging with fellow friends and acquaintances who wish to shrug off the quiet familiarity of married life and complacent adulthood with the help of copious amounts of alcohol and an occasional playful-and-naively-awkward aside to or about a waitress, from which activity I had returned pleasantly sauced and perhaps more ardent than I had been of late in foisting my attentions upon my patient and beautiful wife, who, if I may be permitted a small boast, wasn’t exactly left displeased by said insistent affection, and, to be frank, got the child she had always longed for out of the deal, which left us well-squared when I could only faintly recall our encounter the next morning, which, I must insist, is no slight on the amorous abilities of my spouse.

But, as I said, I had just become a new father, which does one to inspire one with, not to sound trite or cliché, overwhelming awe at the much-cited “miracle of life” and inspires, between the breathless and restless care required by newborns at nearly all hours of the day, the sort of rumination and self-examination that a person like myself, normally prone to a sort of pleasantly stumbling and largely autonomic passage through life, well, it makes people like myself nervous and not a bit disconcerted, as if I had suddenly realized that the face I saw in the mirror every morning was not, in fact, my face, but the face of a man who had, for over two decades, been pleading insistently for help to the idiot who stared blankly back at him with absolutely no success, despite resorting to every manner of communication available to him, include reasoned argument, emotional appeal, manipulation, obscenity-laden beration, Morse code, sign language, flares, and a brief but amusing flirtation with a teach-yourself-semaphore self-paced book and video set.

Like I said: I had recently become a father, and was perhaps having more trouble than usual sleeping, or, to be precise, staying asleep, as falling asleep was beginning to fall upon me as weather falls upon most other people – in large, uncontrollable, and wildly unpredictable bursts which tended to erase all traces of any activity that occurred before the sky opened up – but our new infant, even though I was assured by the pediatrician several times that it slept nothing short of 18 hours a day, appeared to catch its copious amounts of sleep in 90-second intervals punctuated by shrill, incessant screaming, a habit which, if I’m to be honest – and I’m a firm believer in authorial honesty – made me reconsider both my decision to become a father and my vow to never take another’s life.

Anyway, having become the proud, beaming father of the aforementioned bundle of joy, etc., my wallet had begun to assume the role of a daily journal, stocked regularly with the documentation and detritus of parenthood, most of which were photos – candid shots of the young one eating, sleeping, screaming, or some novel combination of the three, which, never having children, my wife and I had never before seen – the chemical blues and flash-starved flesh tones of the pictures becoming more and more compressed in the wallet, the folds developing petalled wrinkles that hatched the tiny repeated face and tiny repeated hands and tiny, open, repeated frustrated mouths with crinkled paper veins, all of which I would regularly disgorge from my wallet at the slightest provocation – sometimes even the word “child” or “kid,” even if used in an innocuous sentence like “look at that kid crossing the street,” would trigger an instinctive reach for my wallet to display the hard-won treasures of my battle with paternity.

It was, of course, a short step to taking my child with me everywhere, especially seeing as my wallet had swollen to such a size that, anytime I sat down, my spine was displaced to an arc, curved to counterpoint my shoulders to my propped and wedged hips, giving me an appearance not unlike that of a hunchback or one who suffers from one of the rarer bone diseases, cocked and folded in upon their own body – a posture, let’s be honest, which neither inspires confidence nor serves as a positive model for one’s progeny, because one must always be thinking of how one’s child, no matter how young and insensible to the world they may appear, will remember – and thus emulate- the actions of their parents, a burden of behavior that, quite frankly, terrified me, but which I think I was admirably living up to, bringing the young one into the bathroom to witness the meticulous tooth brushing of its father – I had installed some higher wattage lights, as I understand their eyesight is poor, as well as some brackets on the wall to hang the car seat, so the child could be a mere two feet away while I demonstrated circular strokes, the thorough scouring of the tongue, the swishing of mouthwash for at least 60 seconds, pooling the minty antiseptic near the gum line.

But as I was saying, I had quickly run into the limits of photos, throwing my back of alignment in the process, and came to the conclusion that it would be simpler to just carry the baby with me at all times – all the squalling and smells aside – for the ease of reference: yes, this is the new child I’m constantly referring to and, yes, it does appear to have eyes similar to mine, a dull blue and speckled brown, if you care to look closer, and these are its arms, which it is able to move with almost disturbing alacrity, though it seems to be lacking some basic motor control and seems almost continually surprised to find it has hands attached to itself – something I’ve been intending to work on with the little tyke, and, before you say anything, yes, I am fully versed in the current literature on child development, and, yes, I’m fully aware of the limitations of infants in terms of muscle control and rational thought but – let’s be honest – we, as a society, I believe, expect far too little of children, hung up as we are on a biologically deterministic view of what the can and cannot do, instead of evaluating each individual on his or her own merits, which, in the case of my child, meant being able to read in its blue-patinaed gaze more than neurons rearranging themselves beneath its barely-firm skull to facilitate pattern recognition or depth perception, but an obvious desire to please those who brought it into the world, an eagerness to help and to master social interaction, which is, of course, why I saw no problem in folding my child until it was roughly the size of a wallet, the better to free my hands up for the broad gesticulation I’m so famous for.

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...