Writing prompt: Give us some trivia
Illustration by Ed Harriss.
I was born with a stork bite on my neck, an egg-shaped mark pink as a salmon fillet. On some children this mark fades, but on me it spread down and around my neck, a two-inch wide necklace of permanent blush. “That’s a natural piece of jewelry,” Mom would say, “Some people pay good money to have that kind of thing tattooed on their skin.” Those people didn’t live in my town. The people in my town thought my neck band was the mark of the Beast. After twenty turtleneck winters and dickey summers, I finally had a plastic surgeon burn that thing off of me. It was worth every cent, every painful minute.
People think that calling them stork bites is cute. Like the stork doesn’t exist and, even if he did (yes, it’s the males that you have to worry about), he wouldn’t nip an innocent baby on the nape of the neck! What do they know about storks? Those birds are aggressive as hell. There’s nothing cute or funny about them or their predilections. That’s the brain stem, you know. One chomp there and you’re paralyzed for life. Dead before you even get a chance to give out a second wail of hello to the world. My parents turned their backs on me for five seconds … five seconds … and that nasty stork took his opportunity.
Still, I’m one of the lucky ones. My father had a younger brother, Cole was his name (they did name him). He was born at home. After the exhaustion of a 33-hour labor, his mother took a nap. The midwife was in the bathroom, and Grandpa — well, Grandpa wasn’t known for hanging out at the scene of a birth or death. By the time the midwife came back into the room, the stork’s work was done. Missy waved that bottle at Cole's face, tried to coax the nipple between bluing lips. When she turned him over, she saw it. This was no salmon mark, but a clear bloodless bite, a chunk of the baby’s neck gone missing.
So. You think the stork brings life, carries babies to their mamas in a soft muslin hammock, all pure and sweet and accommodating? No. Babies are born through blood and sweat and pushing, through exertion, the body like a machine that just keeps going until that thing is out. Then you have to keep watch, for the stork waiting to make his mark, for the death that can creep into the room on innocent-looking sleep, for the deadly cough that you can’t hear from down the hall.
Keep your babies close.