Alan Sincic

            Long before I read the book about how the father and the mother collide – the diagram of the docking maneuver and the pics all prickly with arrows that point to the tumbler and the spring and the shank – I’d assembled a picture of my own. 

            You begin with a bun. Bun in the oven. Baby out the body of the mother. But by the time I was ten or so I knew you need a kind of yeast to make it -- the bread, the baby – rise. But where do you get the yeast? Where does it come from? In National Geographic I read about a sponge in the sea, stuck to a rock or whatever, and it releases, like a sneeze, a batch of little spores, a cloud of spores to random off into the open ocean to meet, eventually, the mother sponge.

            The air is an ocean, right? The one thing we all of us share. The one thing we – every single minute – swallow into the center of the self. And particles. You got particles in the air. Smoke. Clouds. And through the air they travel, and from one person to another. Billions of particles you vacuum into that hollow in the heart of you.

            So over the course of a season I cobbled together a theory. I could see in the neighbor kids, how in the shape of the face or the cut of the frame or the hitch of the step they carried the echo of the mother and the father both, the two together under the same roof, as if the nearness was a key, as if the rafters and the beams, the counter and the bookshelf and the high top of the dresser captured the spores of the father as he, day after day, exfoliated hither and thither. It was everywhere, the dust. Dust with a direction. A stir in the air. The mother breathes. Ignition.

            So there you go. A breath of air becomes, in the end, a baby. And even after I found, at the end of the summer, at a rummage sale in the basement of the Presbyterian Church, the recipe itself, the blueprint, a hardback no bigger than a book of prayer, the binding in a ripple and the glossy paper swollen with the stains of a flood or a leak or a storm -- The Matrimonial Bond: Advice For Newlyweds -- and pried it apart, shucked it like an oyster to find inside it the shock of a lifetime, I clung to the original theory. You can talk all you want about the plumbing, the innards all icky with a liquidy goo, the bang-bang-bang of the bodies but no. Gimme the air. The breath of air. Something majestic about air. Big enough to buoy a moon. Small enough to cinder a cigar. The breath of God, right?