I can almost see them, there together
in the plane’s close cabin,
the propellor chopping.
My mother lies on a gurney and my father sits
beside her: nervous, I imagine, moving his long hands
forward and back on his kneecaps. He glances
at the incubator pushed against the wall —
empty but on, its glassy sides humming.
The two holes where you put your arms in
are like blank goggles, staring at him.
It was late at night or very early
in the morning, he remembers,
and I picture a blinking light on the wingtip,
darkness through the single window. Far off,
a smear of sunset, greenish, low along
the thick cloud cover:
sunset or maybe sunrise,
one behind them, one before them —
close to the solstice as it must have been,
and so far north, I wonder
if there really was a night for them at all
or just two long summer days, stitched together
by the briefest dimming of the lights.
Over Crescent Harbor and the Sitka Sound,
the deep cedar forests, the one white mountain
which my mother loved to paint
and which, I’ve since learned,
is called “The Sister” —
the tiny light of the plane moves over
the water, my parents inside.
And we float silently in
an ocean of our own:
my sister and I, not yet born, in the briny darkness
that precedes the beginning.
Twenty-eight weeks at that point, our bodies curled
like the bodies of shrimp — the globes
of our heads, veined and translucent,
almost lit up: glowing with blood.
PROTOMEMORY was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.