Baby Language

The following is a flash prose piece by me, Evin Hughes.

An old photograph of me and my twin brother Kevin.

The doctors mistook my singsong language for wailing as they pulled me from the womb; they had never known verbs to be so lyrical, nouns so rhythmic. I was not happy, for I felt like the pit squeezed out of a freshly opened peach. I tried telling them to put me back into the membranous isolation. I tried telling them I didn’t like their cold hands, the way the blinding lights intensified their white coats, the smell of latex and the constant, insipid beeping of machines.

I was quieted by familiar voices: the bouncing baritone of a man and the soft hum of a woman. They took me to their fruit-scented home. They took turns passing me gently back and forth into arms sleeved in red and brown coats, warmed by the sun. They placed me against chests and the metronome of beating hearts whose cadence taught me how to sing. I thought I had known language until I heard the serenade of Mom and the staccato of Dad, until I felt the isolation of, “We love you, little peach. You are ours.”

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