Eaton Hamilton

This is solely my baby’s clock, clock of my little lost one, my tiny underappreciated one, my evermore gone one, little warm wet egg, miniature planet which used to reside inside me all my seventeen years and even before, in its own grandmother, in my mother during the eight months when I resided inside her, little eggy peggy, eggy peggy pudding and pie, kissed the boys and made them cry. My egg of red bundled oh so soft and sweet and safe inside my oriole’s nest with her sisters like so many pomegranate seeds, waiting, drowsing, waiting, sleeping, waiting, waking in the instant of monthly explosion, pop! flung out into the unknown, alone, single celled, spinning, egg of wild waving filaments, tumbling through the void to land in the drinking straw of the fallopian tube, woah, nelly, hang on nelly! Somersaulting, vertiginous in slo-mo, down the ropey rabbit hole, brim full of her genetic self—great great Gramma Ilene’s eyes, great uncle Edward’s bum kneecap, great great Grampa’s long black eyelashes, Gramma’s sweet disposition and great aunt Emmaline’s intelligence. Sucked along the red river like flotsam and jetsam, evolution and instinctive lifeforce, somersaulting and picking up speed before skidding to a stop. Yowsers, it’s a plethora of swain, ten thousand tiny wavering arrows on a wet war field. One sperm hits her head on, plonk! he’s in halfway up to his neck. And then the moment of genetic answer down through his X and Y, Yippee! yippee-yi-o, life! My gal has a stitch in her side, and woah, woah nelly what is that? Some leaping in her cellular gut, some binging and banging, caterwauling, thudding, rattling, thumping, slipping, sliding, toboganning through flesh, burrowing, turning around to thumb his nose at the wanna-be’s, the coulda’s and woulda’s! Little ingratiator, minute courtier, full of his own genetic dice toss plus a pollywogal tail, Daddio Steve’s great gramma’s sense of humour and Auntie Simone’s swanlike neck and great great Uncle Pierre’s bad kidneys. Hunka, hunka burning love that can change history just.like.that, that has just made a new person. Ovum, sperm: they join and become the proceeds of conception, hidey ho and drum roll. They tumble fallopian, roll off one-celled towards my womb, headlong into my gummy, treacly, syrupy, icky, gloppy, mucilaginous uterine wall.