Basic Human Reproduction

It was like the Micheals to boast after dinner when the wine was drunk and lips were stained. “Will we show them Greg?” The lady Micheals said, she had a regular habit of pretending to be subtle. I’d seen her do it several times at our dinners and had often played the fool who let her continue. Her strategy consisted of creating a face of complete internal shock as though remembering something crucial. And then she’d bob her head as though working it out in her mind and this forces anyone in proximity to just bite, and ask, “What? What is it?” Like most successful hunting techniques, hers evolved, and now included her husband, Mr. Micheals.

            “Oh, its not a big deal.” He said to his wife, but looked on Linda and I. His eyes flashed like an empty wineglass caught in a lie. Mr. Micheal’s carried the misfortune of having his face, and permanently so. On his face he carried this neutral plateau of a mouth, but the rest seemed mildly elastic like a sock to it, if necessary, would prove futile. He stood in place, not wanting to lead us for the door to leave or for his study. He was a man who thought himself humble, so he waited for us to show complete interest.

            “Come on, what have you got hidden away?” I said. Linda’s grasp on my arm constricted and she tugged in the direction of the door to leave. She knows how these things go with the Micheals. We are lightly drunk and talk is easy and hard to cut at the tip. Mr. Micheals had a hobby of collecting scientific breakthroughs and had a hobby of talking on about them so long that they were likely obsolete by his end. It was so with the terrarium of the bitty little dinosaurs. He had three and he spoke endlessly of them, their Latin names, the etymology of the names, from which species they evolved and so on and all the while Mrs. Micheals is teasing the poor b******s with an asparagus stick and baby-babbling to them from over the tank. Eventually I believe the dinosaurs died or he relocated them. “So long as we can make it quick, to speak candidly, Linda and I are trying to get pregnant now, and tonight’s the night for our best results.”

            “My! That’s great,” he said and placed the traditional hand on my shoulder, it felt heavy, forced and the instant it was there felt much too long.

            “So you will be doing things the old fashion way?” Mrs. Micheals said, fascinated by the mention of basic human reproduction.

            “Well yes,” Linda started, her face awash with a light red and her voice defensive. I told her people would question us this way, and since it is what we both prefer we must be patient, and thick skinned. “It’s worked for millions of years, why change anything?”

            “And its more fun this way,” I said, nudged Linda and rubbed her back where the dress left it bare. I did this until the red of her face retreated to the light wine flush it was before. The Micheals exchanged wordless asides and laughed when I winked to them. The laughs were weak, voiceless, laughs lacking in commitment like balloons without helium, they just sank limp to the floor.

Mrs. Micheals had a fit of internal questioning and she nodded her head with those spacey eyes. The hook bobbed in the water. “But, oh, never mind.” She flicked her hand, but Linda said, “what? What is it?” Mrs. Micheals, with a bent finger between her lips said, “But, will you have a boy or a girl, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Of course not. We aren’t sure, that is another thing left to nature’s discretion.” Linda said. The lady Micheals hid a trembling bottom lip and her husband watched her, he looked taller, he eased off his heels and was all toes. He looked like a lightning rod ready to come upon her.  

“Shall we see what the Micheals have got hidden away?” I said and took Linda by the waist and with an easy hand, gestured our hosts to lead us to the study. We started down the hallway. “Let me guess, it’s a little T-rex, no wait, a megalodon in a sardine can?”

            I broke off from Linda, Mrs. Micheals kept shoulder pace with her. It was a rather long hallway, generously broken up with rooms that led to empty guest bedrooms and wall space filled by frames of moving art.  Within a frame, a young girl sat on a swing set alone, a storm cloud alive behind her. This must have been one of the wife’s. Mr. Micheals collected works of twirling, shifting abstract compositions, where the texture changes from strict two dimensions to an ambiguity of two and three. One night he became so drunk by bourbon and so intoxicated with his own taste in art, he made himself sick meditating on his newest addition. That had freed Linda and I the rest of the night.

            Mrs. Micheals heels hit the tile louder at my back, “You know it is quite simple now to take supplements for the sex of the fetus, isn’t that right dear?”

            “Yes, simple.” Mr. Micheals said in the hallway to the hallway ahead of us.

            I looked back to the two women, Linda’s lips forced together as though she were being flogged but was trying to remain silent. Mrs. Micheals did not look at her but made a pinch gesture with her hand as though to hold an invisible pill and she said, “Yes, the pinks and the blues--Want a girl, take the pink. A boy? Try the blue. Isn’t that marvelous. What are you and Dan going for? Oh you must have an idea. Why not choose the sex?”

            “We just want the surprise,” Linda said at the door of Mr. Micheal’s study. Her response quieted the other woman. Mrs. Micheals nibbled on her knuckle. These strange anticipatory silences always wait on me. Greg liked the suspense to bottleneck behind the door. Linda and I really needed to get home where our bed waited, and Mrs. Micheals gnawing of her knuckle disturbed me profoundly so I said, “Alright, what do you got this time, a flying pig? Aristotle’s recreated medulla oblongata in a mason jar?”

            “It is nothing overly extraordinary,” Mr. Micheals said in the dim light of the hallway. “But it is the future.”

He opened the door and light from the hanging chandelier nipped on immediately. The study, with its mahogany cabinets and dark marble mini-bar looked like a small museum. In glass a encasement, Micheals displayed a prosthetic arm with a gumball machine assortment of multicolored buttons and wires which he claimed could out perform the standard human arm and when he was rather drunk told me he prayed to lose an arm so he could have it surgically applied to him. A microscope neighbored the prosthetic, Micheals claimed it could observe the orbit of an electron about the nucleus though to me they looked only like dust particles. The terrarium of miniature Jurassic herbivores sat on the edge of his work desk, he had not removed them after all. The women sat in the arm chairs that faced the desk and presented an excellent view of Micheals’ diplodocus on its hind legs and its front legs pressed to the glass, its long neck reaching over the top of the encasement, its eyes looking on the women. Mrs. Micheals sat in the chair, turned her head so that she may as well have been outside in the chill of the night. Her legs were crossed and her hanging foot was curiously still and stiff, she made use of her knuckle, making grotesque, precise and incremental bites into it. Mr. Micheals leaned against his desk where the terrarium ended, poked the head of his little reptilian and pushed his hands out flat and wide as if to say, ‘well here it is,’ and then he did say, “so what do you think?”

            I stepped to the desk and looked over the dinosaur prison. Three living figurines of dinosaurs moved about, one dipped its head into the hand-scooped pond. A filler noise left my lungs while I searched for something new. “Did you get another dinosaur? Don’t tell me you added a carnivore.”

            The lady Micheals coughed. “Its not the dinosaurs but what the dinosaurs are placed on,” she said, her talk fought through her teeth and knuckle. Mr. Micheals fidgeted, he beamed at her but her gaze was off to the corner of the study. He came out of it with a smile, slapped the surface of the desk and said, “Yes, exactly, the desk. Thank you dear. Don’t you see? Look, look.” He grasped the leg of the desk in both hands, the leg was rather thick but thinned as he followed it down. I noticed the small planter pot on the floor. He gave it a symbolic shake, though it did not move the desk in the slightest. “Until recently a tree needed to be cut down to build a table, now the table is the tree”

            I asked him how. How did they, whoever ‘they’ may be, manage to do it. A silent but visible sigh escaped Linda, she curtained a yawn with her hand and when finished said, “they can do it all with genetic engineering. I’m afraid the tomatoes I buy from the grocery store are soon to cry out for help when I put them on the cutting board. Almost seems unnatural. Oh, but its very nice in this case.” She tacked on the last bit for Mr. Micheals’ sake. She continued, and Mrs. Micheals eyes narrowed, her head shook in small flicks of the chin, Linda did not see this, “we just need to realize what is too much, and which opportunities should be explored.”

            Mrs. Micheals clutched both arm rests and straightened fast and from the seat, “Do you think you two are better than my husband and I? Because we are not going to have our children naturally and disadvantage them so.” Her voice trembled but it took the room and she wagged her head and mocked, “oh it will have your nose and his eyes. What will it be daddy’s little princess, Mommy’s little man"how tantalizing not to know what it will acquire. My husband and I have slaved over our child-to-be’s traits: athletic, beautiful, and the mind of a philosopher king!” She opened and slammed the door, her footsteps could be heard in the hallway and leading up the stairs.

            Mr. Micheals’ cheeks hallowed, he had not breathed, his torso looked inflated. He looked to the ground, did not look at us. His wife’s outburst had maimed him critically and even more, had drastically lowered the importance of his new desk. Linda looked inward, she chewed a lip and there was the tick of her picking at her fingernails. Mr. Micheals spoke and his words almost went under us, “Linda , I apologize, I know you in no way meant to…” but she waved it off and smile came of the bitten lips and she said in a cushioned tone, “its no worry, go talk to her.”

            I stood and said nothing at all to Micheals, but he nodded to us and turned to me, his gaze level, lifted from the ground, and said, “Dan, I’d still like you to take a real look at this table, you may let yourselves out when finished. And congratulations on the baby. From both of us.” Without a handshake he entered the hallway and closed the door to his study.

            I asked Linda if she was okay and she said yes, only marginally shooken-up. She patted and flattened her dress. I could see in the stony way she held her face she resented Mrs. Micheals. We’d go soon, I said to her, but I was legitimately interested in the desk so it would be just a moment. The dinosaur’s heads watched me as I moved about the desk. Its texture was rough and professional, its color dark like the soil in the planter. Linda rose from the armchair and leaned on the desk, pushed on it and eventually heaved herself onto it. “Seems sturdy,” she said now half laying on the table, her legs hanging from the edge, the terrarium to her side. Join me, she said, but be quick.

What about the Micheals? I asked, grinning with a heart ready to burst.

The Micheals? She said, they are probably reviewing a menu of baby ingredients laying in bed not knowing they could make on right there. I laughed and joined her, put my weight on her, kissed her. The table held and I watched the dinosaurs as Linda’s breathing fogged the glass.

Reviews

[Chadvonswan]

Nice. You should continue this into the novel format. This little piece has lots of potential: the Michaels supplemented babies, the natural desk, the sex and the blues n pinks, ,,,
I can see this as a modern day scifi-romcom

[Gaston Villanueva]

You have a really cool way of telling stories Mr. Puente
Nice job as always

[ZackOfBridge]

Thanks G-Money.