Jim Eigo is a writer, editor and fledgling bookmaker living in New York City.  You can read a selection of his activist medical writing at actup.org, a selection of his writing on art at leslielohman.org/MainPgs/Journalhtml, and snippets from his novel-in-progress at sixsentences.ning/profile/JimEigo. 

Little Eli (March 20, 2011. Issue 26. The SLAM & FLASH Issue!)

Across the darkened ceiling, to a muffled soundtrack of traffic, shadow chases shadow. They seem to promise a future but deliver as yet more of the same. It must be after midnight.

There’s a little boy in the crib in the next room, sleeping (his breathing tells us) peacefully. How ever did he get there? Of course the man, who brought the infant home from the hospital himself, knows how the little boy got there. He knows, too, better than to expect this simple fact to silence a question like his. So this time he poses it aloud, not aiming it anywhere in particular.

“How ever did the little boy get here?”

In the dim light before dawn the simple words land lightly and in swift succession on the woman who is lying next to the man, and she accepts them as if they had been sent with her in mind. After they settle, the prevailing sound, louder than the distant street: the small rise and fall of the breathing body at rest in the next room. Stripped of the want and wail of his normal call, does it have a message?

From the far edge of her perceptual frame comes what? Like the lower corner of a curtain, perhaps, before an open window, it flickers and retreats, material so flimsy that, without so much as an utterance from her, still it’s fluttered away. Is the sudden hand on her belly her own, or his? Somewhere a fortuneteller lays hands on the crystal ball and, amid the clouds, sees all.

Long after the still air in the room has cleared of the man’s question, the woman in her head is still framing her reply. When at last she releases it, it sounds and then it echoes, at once a simple declaration and a question of its own.

“What we have to ask ourselves now is: what ever will we name him?”