THE CONCEPTION

What it says on the tin....

It was devoid of senses and had no means of knowing anything about its environment but it was swimming along with millions like it, and it had one hell of a journey in front of it. That was the sperm that was soon going to conjoin with a specific egg and form the very start of him.

To all intents and purposes it was a very ordinary sperm, and nobody had ever even thought of giving it a name. Why should they? There were millions of siblings swimming alongside him, genderless and nameless, and most would die on the journey and only a handful would make it as far as the egg, so why name any of them?

I’d like to be called something, he might have thought. Or she might have thought. Or it might have thought. It might have come with a shock that the sperm had no specific gender of its own, but it didn’t know about gender or about anything.

And it had no senses either.

At the moment it had gushed (with millions of siblings) from the dark place which had been all it might have ever known if it had ever known anything it had no concept of light or sound, dark or silence, so the grunted ecstasy that had accompanied its emergence into the light went totally unnoticed.

“Yes! Yes! Oh bloody yes!” fell on the deafness that was the sperm as it squiggled away, washed by a wave of toxicity as it entered its new and final world and went in search, mindless and unguided, of its prey.

And it wasn’t alone, but many were dying all around it! Maybe that’s why it had been denied the gift of senses, for what living creature wants to witness the mass slaughter of its siblings or taste the cavalier fluids that destroy them?

But the sperm felt no anger. How could it? Denied any access to its environment it didn’t know anything about all that slaughter but just pursued a course it didn’t understand, going ever deeper and deeper into the unknown where either it or a clone of it would fall upon its target and become part of it as a new life was fertilised into being.

Swim, swim, swim.

That was all of life, swimming and swimming and swimming.

And time. It needed so much time. But then a centimetre is a marathon when you’re microscopic. When you’re just part of a creamy fluid and haven’t had your existence suspected until optical instruments were devised that could enlarge your svelte form until you were visible no human being guessed you were more substantial than gloopy milk.

Swim, swim, swim.

Outside the confines of your tiny life your hostess sleeps whilst her egg awaits your arrival. But you still swim. You have to or one of those wretched siblings will get there first, and if you experienced any thoughts at all they would be along the lines of you want to get there first and to hell with all of the rest.

That hostess tosses and turns, smiles at a recent memory that has somehow managed to attach itself to a dream and made her wriggle, and her loving partner snores next to her, drained for the moment of the essence that is you … if you only knew it … but you don’t, along with senses you have no awareness. She smiles in her sleep, wriggles a little, maybe even manages a silent gasp, and he snores on.

And you swim on. And on and on, though the night is long and dark. But your life, with that total lack of sensory input, is total night.

You have no way of knowing when the sun rises and you can’t even detect movement when she yawns and rises from her bed and looks with sublime affection at the still snoring face of her lover. But she lives on a different scale to you, she needs to wash and dress, she especially needs that shower, or thinks she does.

Last night was heavenly, but its remnants need to be washed away. There they go, in a cascade of nice clean warm water, millions of them, your siblings, let’s call them the ones that got away. But you’re not among them. You’re doing the only thing you can do, and swimming into the unknown. The dark, vast, moist unknown. The reason for your being.

She towels herself dry and you have no means of detecting the movement. He, the snorer you didn’t hear snoring joins her in the shower and they speak, but you can neither hear nor understand.

“I love you,” his voice rumbled, meaninglessly.

“And I love you too,” she replies lightly, words that you’ll never hear but words about you. Because you are swimming still, tail thrashing, head looking what it isn’t because it looks determined but knows nothing about determination. They might have started your journey, but it’s down to you to finish it or die in the attempt.

“I wonder if it worked that time?” his meaningless rumble asks.

“I hope so,” she simply replies, “but if it didn’t there’s always tonight!”

“Give me strength,” he jokes, then “I love you,” he sighs, working the towel round the parts that signify maleness and grinning knowingly at them.

She giggles and pulls a pair of pink and white knickers on.

Then she dresses in white top and black trousers, grabs a morsel of breakfast because she’s too late to sit down, and rushes to the bus stop down the road from where she lives.

“Hi there,” she says to a short queue waiting for the same bus.

“Hi,” comes a motley reply

And suddenly there it is, in front of you! Huge, like the most significant object in your world, the egg, your destination, the one thing you were created for in a testicular frenzy only yesterday, beckoning you, magnificent, your one and only target.

The bus, double decked, red, impressive, comes round the bend from the town centre and pulls with busy majesty to the stop to let the short queue climb aboard.

And as she does that, as she lifts one leg and then the other and smiles at the bus driver and she hands her change over to him then takes the ticket, that wonderful, exhausted sperm feels a warm embrace as the egg, her egg, her only egg that month, absorbs it with an unlimited and creative affection, and forms the very, very beginning of a male child…..

And, my dearest friend, you are conceived….

© Peter Rogerson 08.12.16

Author's Note

This is an expansion of my short story, "The Meeting" which I like as it is but realise I could have expanded some aspects of it. So we have the conception....

Reviews

[Tony Jordan]

This had a Woody Allen quality to it. I liked the way you wove the story. Good job! :)

[Peter Rogerson]

I was a bit worried that my snippets of life be a little too small and detailed, but maybe it's going to be ok.