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At first she felt nothing.  She had been distracted by a strangely familiar yet not quite recognisable sound - meat on a grill, water on a flame - so brief and surprising that she was momentarily oblivious to the villainous fangs that had harpooned her skin, shooting venom into her flesh.

The pain, cloaked in shock, had disguised itself magnificently, but before long it crept out of the shadows and launched its attack.

Paralysis.  Fire devoured her muscles before morphing into a cramping ache that strangled the nerves and froze the tissue.

Asphyxiation.  Sand poured into her lungs, now hourglasses at the mercy of time.

Nausea.  An army of antibodies fought to expel the poison.

Disorientation.  Toxins coursed through her veins, turning the world upside down and taking her vision hostage.

Loss of hearing.  A river of blood flooded her ear canal.  Just before the door to the audible universe closed forever she heard what she now realised to be the distinct hissing of her tormentor as it slid away through the rushes.

That was the exact moment that Angela Rosalia began to live her life inside a glass bottle.

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Shifting her weight on the pew, Angela traced the lips of the priest as they curled around vowels and embraced consonants.  His tongue flicked against his teeth as he spat out the words, his jaw see-sawing with purpose as his pupils dilated and retracted, his arms exalted heavenward.  

Then God said: ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

She translated his gesticulations as frustration with the torpor of his flock, lost - she suspected - in thoughts far removed from the holy.  He vacillated between spurts of arm flailing, red-faced puffery and head-bowed defeat that at once amused and saddened her.

The theatrics of his performance struck her as rather amateurish and - judging by a medley of huffs, puffs and pickings - the Sabbath matinee had failed to captivate the audience.  In truth, it was a theatre of sorts, a weekly simulation of faith that served as the prelude to a social gathering of gossipers and gossipees.

When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground.

She cast her eyes over the dismal, motley bunch and her gaze fell upon the balding head of the butcher, a fleshy middle-aged man of astonishing hubris who possessed bovine qualities both in manner and appearance.  A bead of sweat trickled down his neck from what hairline remained, to join a small puddle that had formed at the nape.

Further along the line sat the town clerk.  He was a petulant, fidgety creature, who thought prose convoluted and time wasting, preferring only to talk in numbers.  Since he had become a widower, he fancied himself as quite the Lothario and to her alarm gave Angela a toothless, lascivious wink.

The barmaid was nestled beneath the lectern, eyes rolling with boredom.  The facetious young woman - a good deal younger than the story her face told and who had shared her thighs with half the village and most of those passing through - was plaiting her curls, quite aware that the local inebriate was feasting his beady eyes upon her breasts but less aware of the globule of holy spit that had landed on the crest of her cleavage.

The congregation rose for the hymn and Angela rifled through the leaves to the page and observed, with some lament, the deft fingers of the organist as they glided across the keys.

This is my Father’s world,
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and ‘round me rings
The music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world.

I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas
His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father’s world.

With a sombre heart, she gently placed her lips around the words but they were nothing more than empty whispers, for she could not bring herself to sing.

The last time the world had heard her voice - one so ethereal in beauty, so enchanting and otherworldly that it reached out far beyond humanity - had been only a few days before the snakebite.

A young and promising musician, she travelled to the edges of the world, which promised her its treasures in return for her gift.  Music was her life and in her naivety she had taken it for granted because she could not even fathom a silent world.  She was touring with the Vienna Philharmonic and was in Beijing for their last performance of Mahler’s Song of the Earth.

The words cascaded from her mouth, flowing from within her as naturally as a river into a sea.  She did not just sing of maidens picking lotuses, she was - for those few moments - there next to them, scooping up the blossoms in her hands.

Sunshine weaves a web around them

Mirroring their sweet eyes in the water.

She did not just sing of the earth, but stood there on the hill with Mahler and watched as night fell and the world prepared for another day that only the fortunate might wake up to, and spring renewed the earth again and again.

Oh see!

Like some tall ship of silver sails the moon upon her courses

Through heaven’s blue seas.

When sound disappeared from her life, she could not bear the loss of her love and retreated from the world as she knew it, vowing never to open her mouth in song again and her grief weighed heavy on her soul.

Dolores Bilbao traced circles on her pregnant belly with her forefinger as she listened to the gravelly voice of Priest Olivios.  His tone was suitably didactic but also dangerously soporific and the throaty cadences of the sermon washed over her thoughts, making her eyelids drape heavily over her eyes.  He recorded every Sunday mass for her and had done so for the 22 years that she had not left the house.

One day long ago, her father - an obstinate but kind-hearted and gentle man - announced that they were moving to the other side of the village.  He had been forced to sell the land but he had no intention of leaving the house that he had helped his father build as a young boy.  He and her brothers set about uprooting the house, digging up the foundations and hoisting it onto a suitably sized wagon that he had hired from a neighbour.  As the youngest, she rode upfront with the wagon man, while the rest of her three brothers, two sisters, mother, father, uncle and grandmother, sat in the living room and held on to the china.

The village was situated on the top of a large peninsula; the northern part bordered by a rather imposing cliff.  Instead of going through the village, which was very bumpy and littered with potholes, it was decided that they would circumnavigate it and follow the cliff road.  Due to the weight of the house, not to mention that of her grandmother, progress was slow.  They had been travelling for half a day and Dolores was acutely aware of the rumblings of her tummy and was relieved when they stopped to have a picnic.  It was then that the ropes gave way to the strain and snapped like the strings of a violin, rolling the house - and her entire family - off the cliff edge.  They rested momentarily on a tree branch, disturbing a family of bluebirds from their nest, before it inevitably gave way and they bounced a thousand feet into the sea, erupting in a splash that soaked the land for miles around.  Once the echoes had subsided from the rocks and the birds had silenced their squawks, the cries were heard of a poor little seven-year-old who was left standing alone on the edge, dripping, as she rang out the sea and tears from her frock.

From that day on she began to suffer from panic attacks and seizures when faced with the great outdoors.  She slowly retreated from the world, fearful of when another episode would take hold of her.  She moved in with the family of the wagon man who looked after her until she was old enough to live on her own.  Then she bought a little house in the southern part of the village, but it was not long before she could not conceive of venturing beyond those four walls and has remained inside all these years.

Since the recordings began she had grown apart from her faith and instead used the tapes to live vicariously.  She relied on them as an unbiased window to the world, without which she would rely solely on the words of her visitors and see only with their eyes.  After years of practise, she was now rather adept at allocating the various murmurings and whispers of the congregation to the names and faces stored in her memory library.  She could pinpoint the stick of the tailor - an eccentric man who approached life with incredible alacrity - tapping gently against the stone floor.  She could hear the larger-than-life butcher mopping his brow with a handkerchief and almost thought she could hear the sweat trickling down his skin.

As the idle worshippers stood to sing, there was a torrent of feet shuffling, knees cracking, pews creaking, coughs released and stifled sneezes gladly expelled.  The house filled suddenly with a cacophony of booming bellows and strident warbles as they broke into song.

The birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world.

He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass,
He speaks to me everywhere.

Her mind wandered lucidly and she imagined the sound waves - tiny vibrations - jostling and bouncing along her airwaves, caught by the juggling pinna, which rolled them down the bowling alley with his 8-pin and into her ear canal. There they wiggled their bottoms and danced with her receptors, searching the cavities of her brain for slides and sound bites of her neighbours.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had done.

Waking to an unpleasant racket invading the still of the womb, he breathed in the saccharine odour of amniotic fluid and heard the syncopated double beat of his mother’s heart against his own and was consumed with melancholy.  He did not think he had it in him to suffer another life.

According to the Babylonian myth Enuma Elish the world was created not by one benevolent God as a utopian whole in no need of evolution in its perfection.  Nor did it emerge from the ashes of dead stars, an energetic soup of particles that made man out of stardust.  Instead it was born out of conflict, a battle between the Gods, that would result in Zeus’ eventual creation of the iron race where evil would manifest itself and man would labour and perish until even the Gods abandoned the earth they had made.  And so it is fitting that his story begins there.

As he lay in Dolores’ womb he thought back to his original self that had first been thrust into existence in Mesopotamia as the illegitimate son of Belshedezzar, one of the last Kings of Babylonia and a young concubine who died during labour. He was born a twin but blood was their only bond, and from womb to grave he stole life from his brother.

Heana was born physically strong and of considerable intellect.  He excelled in politics and commanded a following of fearful devotees, but he had a cold and cruel heart and it was his brother that the people truly loved.  Though he tortured him with vile words and harsh blows, Abednago never retaliated, never raised his hand.  He instead silently suffered Heana’s pernicious ways and continued to love his brother without condition.

One day, they were sent by their father to Resaena to consult an ancient oracle on the future of the Hitite King who he suspected posed a threat to the empire.  They left in the pale light of dawn and travelled for three days in silence, save the odd vituperative remark from Heana.  Normally it was his brother’s stoicism that infuriated him most but this time he was grateful to be alone with his thoughts, for he had other, darker matters on his mind.

They rode down a deep and savage road to the nexus of the universe.  When they reached the mouth of a cave they journeyed further into the chasm, towards the centre of the earth where Beelzebub’s cavern lay and where the flames of the core were white with heat, emitting a tremendous howl.  Stopping just before the gates to the woeful city they found the eight-hundred-year-old oracle they had been searching for.  She saw straight into Heana’s soul and warned him of the immortal coil that transcends time and place, whose shackles were never blind to evil.

In his ignorance and egoism Heana did not take heed of her words and when she answered his questions with riddles he could not understand, the spite and hatred inside him bubbled and boiled and he gauged out her eyes with his blade.

‘There wretched creature, may you never see again!’

‘Brother, you are mistaken for she does not see with her eyes.’

Heana began to laugh.  It was a terrible, derisive sound that echoed in the caves and he turned to his brother and said:  ‘Do you speak with your tongue?’

With those words he pounced on Abednago and sliced out his tongue with one stroke of his knife.  He carried him out of the cave and slung him on the back of his horse, then began the long journey home without pausing to rest.  When he reached the city walls, he waited for darkness to fall.

In the still of the night, he stole into the palace and locked his brother in a disused dungeon, deep beneath its foundations, where he was sure no one would find him and he would not see the light of day again.

When dawn broke, he told the people a tale of a lion that - though he had valiantly fought its jaws with his bare hands to protect his brother - had devoured him nonetheless.  The city wept at the news until the tears flooded the gates and their sorrows floated amongst the streets.

As was the custom, Heana announced the next day that he would be marrying his brother’s widow, Diala.  She had always been wary of her brother-in-law and did not believe his lies.  She felt it within her that her husband was still alive and the night before the wedding she went to a white witch who put a protective spell on her so that no man could touch her other than her true husband, Abednago.  The woman tied a thread of gold around her waist - a symbol of her chastity - that could only be broken by his hands and his alone.

On their wedding night, when Heana found that he could not make love to her, he flew into a rage and frantically tugged at the thread, but it remained as strong as iron.  He beat her until she barely had life left inside her, but she did not yield and, like Penelope, waited faithfully for her husband to return.

Decades passed and he reined the kingdom a relentless tyrant who showed no grace.  He led the army with such brutality and evil that no one dared - not even his father - to second him.  Not once in those years did he speak a word to his brother, only feeding him scraps that he ate in the belief that one day he would see his wife again.

One hot autumn afternoon, he was passing his father’s chambers when he overheard the King lamenting the day Heana was born and wishing that instead only Abednago had sprung from his mother’s womb and if that had been so then the country might still be a blessed land instead of one now torn apart by famine, disease and war.

Heana ran to the chamber where he kept his brother and, without uttering a single word, plunged his knife deep into his chest and tore out his heart.  He returned to his father and hurled the still warm organ at his feet.

‘Here, this is the heart of the one you love.’

The heart of the king was so grief-stricken that it too, stopped beating.

Heana felt a pang in his chest and looked down to see that a scar had appeared on him in the same place and manner that he had slain his brother.  This scar ran deep into his soul and marked the debt of his sins that he would carry with him into the next life.  Every time he closed his eyes to sleep for the rest of his days, he heard the beating of their hearts, for he had bargained with Sin and she had opened up the gates of hell.

The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground.

As the muffled words of the priest resounded in the womb, he thought of what fear could spring from a handful of dust or a fistful of clay and how for epochs man had allowed his ego to destroy himself and to rape the earth.  The world was now full of tales of greed in bed with corruption, betrayal courting murder and wickedness spreading far and wide.  He did not want to be there to witness its demise and began to make his retreat.

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

As she chopped apples, Dolores thought of Adam and Eve, naked and innocent as a baby born into the world, and it appeared to her that the Fall was a design flaw, for it was God who made humankind capable of sin, sufficient to stand but free to fall, weak against a breeze.  It followed then that the life inside her, as with every living person, would inherit that weakness and that frightened her.  How could she allow her baby, whom she had created in her own womb, the freedom of his will but still protect him?

Even before the accident she had been of a particularly nervous disposition.  As a child she was untrusting of her surroundings and led her life through ritual and superstition.  Convinced that the world was a place of utter chaos and jeopardy - a jumble of treacherous molecules colliding with one another at random, she saw that her only chance of survival - of controlling this chaos - was to live by certain rules.

When she woke in the mornings it was imperative that the minute hand rest on an even number.  If it fell on an uneven one, she would close her eyes for another hour, open them again and hope for an even number.  Some days she never got out of bed. For three years she only spoke in backwards sentences and for much of her life she refused to have anything to do with primary numbers.  By the age of twelve, her nerves were in ribbons.

As she could not go to the village, the village came to her.  The baker’s son - a morose boy who appeared to carry the weight of his youth on his shoulders - brought her loaves of bread and pints of milk and used the time as a cathartic offloading of his woes, which she listened to with sympathy but not experience.  The two elderly and garrulous sisters who lived next door and had a quite alarming penchant for homebrew would tend to her garden - which she otherwise watched though glass - and fill her house with tall tales and fresh flowers.  The school headmaster, who was retired now but had taught her when she a girl, delivered books once a fortnight, which she feasted on - a fantasy world that she could lose herself in, and which was in many ways more real than the stories relayed by the villagers.

In part, these acts sprung from good will and a genuine sense of community responsibility (or fear of finding themselves in the same predicament) and partly it was born out of curiosity and boredom.  In the past few months there had been a marked surge in gift-bearing, question-laden visitors, each angling for a clue to the paternity of her unborn child.  Dolores never gave anything away and instead only smiled and enquired after another member of the village.

When she had chopped the last apple, she piled the fruit into the blender.  It began to roar and yell, churning the pieces of fruit around its cavernous belly.

He awoke to an earthquake, the sanctuary of the womb disturbed as its windows rattled and the waters churned into a tsunami.  For a moment, with glee, he thought that his Armageddon had come, but then the noise subsided, echoing faintly around him as the waves settled and, to his dismay, normality was restored.

Since his first life, he had entered and left the world a doomed man, burdened with the weight of his past wrongs, his soul cursed and damned.  His subsequent lives were marked with pain and suffering.  Incurable diseases, torture, betrayal and unrequited love littered his incongruous reincarnations. Each time he was born with a birthmark on his chest that, unknown to him, marked his past sins.

Born to Slovenian parents, the young Henric - nicknamed the ‘glass boy’ because his bones were as fragile - survived only infancy until he fell from his crib and shattered into a thousand pieces.  Once, he had been cursed with a disease that led the sun to burn his skin as if paper and he lived his youth like a vampire in darkness until one day an unwitting maid left the window open and he went up in flames.  In Japan, as Hokuto, he survived long enough to fall so completely and hopelessly in love, only to then watch as she followed his enemy up the aisle, after which he lost a game of Russian roulette solitaire.  A young foot soldier in Germany, Herman saw things no man should ever see.  He outlived the war only to fall down a well the next day and wait seven days before death came to rescue him.

After death, the soul rests for a period of time that is relative to the strain life has bought upon it.  Once recovered, the soul is allocated another living body or being.  This may stretch as far down the food chain as a goldfish, and let it be known that the devastating truth is that their memory goes well beyond a few seconds - a fact that led him to leap from the bowl and end his tedious life gasping for air on the carpet below.  The gestation period in the womb or egg is a time for enlightened reflection on one’s past lives.  Once born, the memory of the past ceases to exist in the conscious.  As is the nature of reincarnation - or metempsychosis to be exact - a ‘life star’ will not be truly liberated from the confines of a physical shell until it has reached Nirvana: a state free from sorrow - Dukka - and completely emancipated from ideas of self and ego.  Footprints of mortal acts walk alongside the soul as it remains in a constant flux of evolution, an energetic causation that branches off into a labyrinth, of which the exit is only known to a few.

The self is dependent entirely on the experience of the senses, involving distinct modes of past, present and future, existing and reacting to their individual exposure to life.  Each interpretation varies, where one man may see light, another darkness, the individual is nothing without the whole.  The blink of an eye can last for all of eternity, but the unwitting man forgets this basis of karma and acts selfishly, oblivious or uncaring of the repercussions of his actions.  The present world has gone astray and the cause is man himself, self-tempted and self-depraved.

Aware now of the past, of Mesopotamia, he felt sorrow and abhorrence at that existence but could not relate to the man that he was then.  He felt alienated yet inextricably entwined with that life.  He could not marry his soul with the evil capabilities of that man, and, in turn, could not feel the guilt that is the backbone of remorse.

Instead he felt only the woes of his affliction.  He was so far removed from that life, so disconnected from that guilt that he could only experience bitterness and self-indulgent pity, sulking as if an adolescent, well beyond his mere eight months in the womb.  He could not see past the injustice of his existence and wanted nothing more than to end it all.  He would have strangled himself with the umbilical cord then and there if it would have put an end to it all, but he knew better than to think that that would be the end of his misery.  He winced at the memory of his life as a polar bear in a Singapore zoo and forced himself back to sleep.

When it became apparent to Angela that, unlike her other faculties, her hearing was not going to return, and might be lost forever, she sat back and watched the silent film of the world play out around her.  As she adjusted to this new visual-heavy world, she began to see everything in miniature, cuttings and snippets of life - the agitated heel of a foot dancing in the air, the flirtatious curling of a lock around a finger or the sideward glance of a lie.  She relished in the prosaic and even the smallest of mundanities came alive.

The world became a jumble of snapshots, one of lips quivering, noses twitching and eyes darting.  Where once before she would have listened to the tone of a voice or the accent to read between the lines, she instead saw them.  Flushed cheeks, dead eyes, the presence of energy or lack of it, all became the pretext to speech.  She no longer relied on sound to navigate her life and slowly the world poured back into the bottle.

From the start, she took a pragmatic approach to her disability and set about learning to read the lips of the people around her.  It was a skill that required intuition, a keen eye and the art of guesswork.  People did not always say what they wanted to say with their lips, but it was almost always there in their eyes, which were less accomplished at lying or capable of expressing the words they could not.  The voice began in the throat and she watched and monitored the vigour at which the Adam’s apple bounced up and down or the way the jugular would expand and pulsate when someone raised their voice or became angry.  Sometimes an entire subplot would develop in a person’s facial expressions - a raised eyebrow, frown lines knitting a cat’s cradle on a forehead, squinted eyes that suddenly pounced open, dilated pupils, the subtle biting of a lip or nostrils flaring.  To her amusement, Angela realised that the ears of the matron who cared for her while she was in hospital took on a twitching life of their own when she became animated or enraged, usually with a maverick patient that had broken the rules.

It was her time in the infirmary that led her to train as a midwife.  Initially the idea had been met with some disapproval and concern but she proved herself when she excelled in theory and outshone her peers in practise.  Her natural capabilities where largely attributed to her disability as it was well known that the sounds of a woman’s cries during childbirth raised the blood pressure and heart rate of anyone within a five mile radius.  Angela’s, however, remained calm and steady and so in turn had a reductive affect on the hysteria of the mother and baby.

Angela placed her hands on Dolores’ stomach and felt the faint and rapid beat of the baby’s heart alongside the mother’s.  The vibrations pulsed through her, she could feel the baby wriggling, kicking, gurgling.  She traced the tiny body with her fingers, but they stopped short and a feeling of unease rose within her.  She took a pair of gloves out from her bag and applied some petroleum jelly to the latex fingers.  As she gently slipped her hand inside Dolores and felt for the baby, she was met only with a cold sensation in contrast to the sticky warmth of the womb.  She withdrew her hand and repeated the measurements once again.  It was then that she recoiled with horror as she realised what was so terribly wrong.

Dolores wanted to preserve the precious memory of the baby’s conception as hers alone and it was for this reason that she refused to divulge details of the father to the villagers.  For all her concerns with routine and control in life, the conception of her child was rather haphazard and unexpected, in the most beautiful of ways.

A barefooted stranger, lost in the night and drenched from the storm, had knocked on her door in need of shelter.  He had walked the earth for thirty years and mesmerised her with a thousand tales of things she could only imagine.  He had witnessed the sun rise over the world from the summit of Everest, watched flesh fall from the clutches of vultures on the rooftops of Delhi, seen a flock of flamingos land on Lake Naivasha turning the water pink and he had danced with the dead in Mexico.  For one night, he served as a lifeline to the outside world that she had for so long been exiled from.  In that moment she felt a wholeness never experienced before and so it was fitting that this brief union of two lost souls, in finding each other just for one night, had created another life.

Doctor Eugeno Menendez Etchegoin was a stout, snuffly man, who was in the habit of muttering to himself at inaudible volumes, his language peppered with the likes of hoi polloi and gobbledegook.  He also had a tendency to simply make words up in their entirety^[1].  He was relentless in his use of a hodgepodge of rare and obsolete idioms, which infuriated his patients.  He commonly referred to the villagers as flibbertigibbets and they in turn called him a charlatan, quack, beatnik and other such things less worthy of repetition.

He was most punctilious and could often be seen examining his large pocket watch, holding it to his ear to ensure that the tick-tock was regular and had no plans for escape.  He feared time, which was not all that unsurprising for a profession that demands you work constantly against it.  

The veteran of many a sleepless night, he devoted the midnight hours to his studies and at the first wink of dawn he could be seen crossing the gates of the village and walking up towards the mountain, to collect various remedial mushrooms, roots and leaves for his concoctions.

Despite these idiosyncrasies he was, in truth, a good-hearted and erudite old man whose wisdom went far beyond the realms of western medicine.  He wanted so desperately to cure the world around him.  It appeared to him that for years the village had fallen into a state of constant malaise, one that stemmed not from the body but from the mind.  At times, late at night, his thoughts were encumbered with the sound of their hearts creaking in the wind, rocking their sick souls to sleep.

There was a knock on the door that sounded as if it came not from that door but from another one, far away in a parallel universe.

‘Doctor?’

He turned to see a rather discombobulated Angela standing in the doorway, her head resting against the wall in a way that implied that she would not be there at all if it were to relinquish its support.

‘Why only the nanodescatessarad I was pondreaming about you. Can I offer you some sagvisdes?’

‘Thank you but I just ate.’

‘Well that’s rather plesinconperfluous but is there some medistion you came to ask me?’

Angela was reminded why she kept her visits to the recondite doctor to a minimum, the conversation was always somewhat testing.

‘It’s Dolores and her baby.’

 ‘Oh fiddlesticks, what is the wee spongedite up to?’

‘He appears to be shrinking.’

‘SHRINKING!!’ he bellowed, veins bulging.  ‘No dilly-dallying we must boothatglov and mastrun!’

Much to his disappointment, Angela did not appear to share his sense of urgency and remained rooted to the spot.

‘Do you have another quiz?’

‘No, the house is unlocked.’

Angela paused and took a moment to gather her words.  

‘There’s something else. It defies all reason and science, but when I felt for the baby inside - to no avail - I could hear his thoughts.

‘That is most shocdisculiar indeed.  If I may veriloquent, it has been known to me for some snipochs that if all that exists in the world lympitalls to reason and logic, the world would be a very dull place indeed.’ He lent back in his chair and inhaled deeply on his pipe, the contents of which were a constant source of speculation. ‘What was he interblatering?’

‘He does not want to be born and I fear that if we do not do something, though what exactly evades me, he will disappear all together.’

‘Quite right, what a quilomdrum.’ He yanked on his winklepickers and with a jaunty step, set off with Angela on his arm in the direction of the reluctant baby and expectant mother.

He had, of course, been aware that he was shrinking for some time, and it had pleased him in the hope that he still might not be born.  It was only now that its attention had come to the midwife that it became a reality for him and he wondered what his alternative fate would be and if Mother Nature were just calling his bluff.  If he were to die a natural death would he not just be born again, into another life just as dismal, if not more, so than this one?  Or would his life’s star explode in a supernova and be swallowed by the abyss?  Would he then float, suspended in a black nothingness for all of eternity, with his thoughts alone for company?

The Doctor knelt down in front of Dolores and began to prod and poke, listen and observe, measure and weigh until he was, well, dissatisfied, but nonetheless convinced of his findings.

He took Angela outside to relay that he had come to the same unfortunate conclusion that she had.  Then he turned on his heels and scurried off as fast as his little legs could carry him to brew blends of teas, batches of potions and all sorts of magical powders and creams.

Over the followings days, under the pretence of a mild iron deficiency and doing his upmost to mollify Dolores, who was becoming increasingly and understandably on edge, he tested his home remedies on mother and baby, but with no joy.  On the ninth day, he took Angela outside and with much remorse expressed his fearful conclusions.

‘No medicine can cure his sickness, for it is a sickness of the soul.  He has fallen out of love with life and I do not know what can bring that back,’ he said with rare lucidity.

He had shrunk now to half his size and day or night he tossed and turned with his thoughts.  Was it admirable to face the bullets of the future, armed with the weapons of today or was it prudent to cut his losses and drown in his sea of maladies?  Was it noble or insane to enter into the world and fight what appeared to be a losing battle, or was it sensible to silently slip away?  Was to feel - to have something - not preferable to nothing?  Fear grew inside him as his life began to ebb away from his ever-tinier grasp.

She had helped deliver thousands of children, and she had a wrinkle for every one of them, but none had caused her as much grief as this one.  She could accept that those who had truly lived life could become disenfranchised from it but she could not bear a child who had not yet even tried.  And with this thought she began to cry - deep, vast pools of tears.  She wept for the baby, for Dolores, for herself and for the miserable world around her.  Then she heard a sound so magnificent and divine that she listened for a lifetime before realising that it was, in fact, her own voice.

His thoughts were suddenly and bewitchingly intercepted by a haunting beauty that he had never experienced before.  In a solitary note, the culmination of his hopes and fears sung out to him and it was in that moment that he understood suffering as a necessary part of existence, not only that, he relished it.  Nothing could be beautiful without pain.  No bird could sing without experiencing sorrow.  No sun could rise without setting.  For every person that left this world, another two entered into it.  It dawned upon him with incredible clarity and peace that without this understanding and acceptance of his past, he and the universal equilibrium would be thrown off course so catatonically that it would catapult not just his world but that around him to spin on an axis that would take a million eons of unravelling to restore its balance.

His heart, as did his mothers, and every single beating heart in the land, stopped dead in its tracks.  The butcher lay down his knife, the clerk’s pen ran dry of ink and the tailor’s stick stopped tapping.  They looked inside themselves and the muddy waters ran clear with hope.

Years passed and the leaves of the universe fell and scattered the ground.  The flowers wilted and covered with frost; they slept through winter and woke again to spring.  The sun rose to paint the morning and set a thousand times while the moon creaked across the horizon.  The song had no words, but, at last, everyone understood its meaning.  When Angela rested on her final, long note their hearts started to beat again, but to a different rhythm.

In this time, he grew and grew until he was not only ready, but eager to meet the world again.  His thoughts were no longer just with himself but with what might be - for better or for worse - and he wanted to live it with his all.  It was then that he heard a loud, guttural sound that seemed as though it came from a distant prehistoric beast, a primal call that he finally knew how to answer.

Dolores awoke from her deep sleep to hear a cry that rolled like thunder across the fields, expelled uncontrollably from her core.  She willingly submitted every thought and emotion and trusted in her body, no longer afraid.  With an unbearable desire to be outside and leave the house she had for so long been imprisoned in, she broke down the door and drank in the air around her with ecstasy.

Her eyelids instinctively shut against the sunlight, a dazzlingly white haze curious to spring.  The ground was covered in a thousand flakes of snow that refracted like a garden of diamonds.  The natural volume of the world was magnified and she could hear at once the rapture of a mother feeding her nest with worms, ants erecting grass scaffolding in their dead city of twigs and foxes chasing their unsuspecting prey.  It was not until she heard the cries of her newborn son that she came to herself and opened her eyes to see the glory of her surroundings, imbued in the sunlight, and she understood, instantly, that everything was different now.

In those final moments, he was thrust from the self he had just briefly known and catapulted into a world that he would see again with fresh eyes, armed with the silent wisdom of his soul.  He emerged, flooding the world with his tears, this time not of agony but of new beginnings and with flesh no longer bearing the scar of his past, for his soul had, at last, grown out of it.

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^[1] Please refer to the Dictionary of Doctor Etchegoin’s Weird and Wonderful Vernacular of Fictitious Idioms. 

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Dictionary of Doctor Etchegoin’s Weird and Wonderful Vernacular of Fictitious Idioms

Interblatering

Verb

Stemming from deblaterate: to prattle, blab, babble.  The act of babbling internally, either in one’s head or out loud to oneself.

Boothatglov

Verb

The act of putting one’s boots, hat and gloves on simultaneously, usually pertaining to a matter of dire urgency.

Lympitalls

Verb

The act of calling out in search of another force or being and, on finding it, attaching oneself to it as if a lympit to a rock.

Mastrun

Verb

The idiom make haste and run but in the act of haste itself, the letters k, h, n, d, along with a pair of es and as were left behind.

Medistion

Noun

A weighted question which has been prepared with a certain amount of deliberation and reflection.  The questioner will invariably have a distinct look of concern in his eye, which will often manifest itself as a nervous twitch.

Nanodescatessarad

Noun

Stemming from decatessarad: a poem of 14 lines.  The doctor divided his thoughts into groups of 14, each one exceedingly brief.

Plesinconperfluous

Adjective

A pleasant enough observation but a nonetheless superfluous, out-of-place and mildly frustrating comment.

Pondreaming

Verb

A layperson daydreams. A person of great intellect or superiority pondreams.

Quilomdrum

Noun

A conflation of conundrum and the Argentine slang word quilombo: used on the streets to refer to a mess, its African origins lead back to a brothel.

Sagvisdes

Noun

Slices of pragmatism with a substantial layer of advice.  Often made by wise old men for scholarly picnics.

Shocdisculiar

Adjective

Shocking, disturbing and peculiar: the key ingredients required to bake a nightmare cake.

Snipochs

Noun

Snippets of epochs.  In this particular case the doctor is referring to 17 periods of 6 ¾ months when events in his life served to illustrate this small revelation.

Spongedite

Noun

A person who takes from a host without giving anything in return. 

Also used to describe a foetus and its relationship to its mother during the gestation period.

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