Baby on a Highway
A SHORT SHORT STORY
BY ELLEN GRAHAM
I AM A BABY. Not acting like a baby, whatever that means. No, really, I am a baby. And what you have all forgotten is this: when you are a baby, you know everything.
I can’t talk yet. But I know things. I will tell you all this later when I can. There are images and words that explain everything in the world, and I grab onto them and they fly away. I am only six months old, but look at what I know: blood on gravel, a crescent moon tilting, Stinky Man holding me, forgetting he’s holding me, almost dropping me, whoops. I see these things and I hear these things: Stinky Man says whoops to the road, there’s a cricket lonely as a train whistle, a scream like the moment I arrived, the chit-chit of a night bird, the pulse of voices, hey hey what happened hey, all right, you?
The two people with me, now not with me. And the man carrying me is scratchy, inside his insides are scratchy. I knew the car would crash because I know everything. Now life will be a process of forgetting. Stinky Man is trying to forget. He uses: speedpotbourbonbeer. I can smell them. He both itches and scratches on the inside.
Before the crash Stinky is sleeping in our car on his wet fluffy, pressed against the window. He is snoring and he is smiling. He can’t hear the words careening around the front seat of the car, bouncing off the glass trying to escape. When the two picked up Stinky Man the words stopped, but when he fell asleep they started. I hear: you, stop, me, wanted, no, now, tomorrow, you. I see: half a snot blower, half a maw, some teeth. Now I hear: a volcano, a hurricane, a natural disaster, a flood, an avalanche, and they mix with the words and the two in front look at each other and not the long dark road.
The crash: I am elevated, like the suspension over messy massy cumulus before I entered the world. I pee, it is glorious. Why do you think we love being thrown into the air? Stinky floats with me for an instant, an instant, what is time to an infant, the instant is a day, a life, a year, a remembering, a forgetting, as I stare at him in the air next to me.
Gravity returns so soon I almost cry but I don’t. That might happen later.
This age, it’s being a neuron, this this this feeling everything. The man in the other car wanted to forget too. It’s a process to forget this feeling of being too alive, and it starts as soon as you hit the light and you can see and hear and touch and feel everything all at once. No wonder we all cry. The beauty, the wonder, the terror, the absolute terror.
Now the smoke. An ash falls on my head. Then another. Stinky has stopped to look at the one about to die. He has forgotten he has seen so much blood before. Every moment that awakens his memory, tickles that place, slips into his mind then around the corner, a fox after a mouse. He blinks and holds me tighter.
No one knows what babies think or that we can think. It’s our beautiful cave, impenetrable, such lovely hiding until we speak words and the words help us forget. Speaking. The vibration of a voice pushing the air and that vibration landing into you is the best dark magic. But it is the first slide into forgetting. Right now, my mind: in one blink the sun’s corona stitched by filament, the rachis of a feather, an aqueduct, blood in the channels of veins, eyesight eyesight eyesight I see I see I see, a bog in a morass, skin! I have to stop, you see? It makes me laugh and that makes Stinky bend to me and drops from his head land on my nose.
Down there, the river shows its intentions below the bridge.
Stinky takes me down the road. The pines lift their fingers and drop them, lifting and dropping. I feel: roots splintering underneath as they spread, a network, alive, branching, crystalline, information leaping , a dendrite from tree to root to everything that passes.
Stinky talks to the big man in a truck and we sit with him, on the bridge, me propped between them. I smell: oil, cigarettes, sweat, pores, coffee, oh coffee. It is warm in the cab. Flashing red lights red lights red lights coming. Stinky gets out and runs and runs and runs. The man in the cab, I can smell his fear now. He turns the wheel, forgetting me, forgetting the open door, forgetting my tiny body. I slide, I am suspended again, now above the water. Rapid, rising, euripus, cataract, slap, words. Gravity returns. I descend. Into water. Into blackness. Back to nothing. See how you spend your life forgetting?