Claire Lawrence

Gills

My son, my little frog, always took a bath with me when he was a baby; it seemed too awkward to bathe him in a sink or a hard plastic tub.  I would nurse him into a stupor and then rest him on my knees and wash him reverently; his long fingers, his fat belly, his funny bald head.  At three months he would smile in his sleep, at six splash the water with his hand and scream with joy.  In the green light of the bathroom his body looked white as a scrap of moonlight.  His dimpled knees.  His dark blue eyes, opening and closing with the sensation of the water.  We were all sea creatures in the womb; both he and I knew it intrinsically in those moments.   

Chordates, the phylum humans belong to, all have embryos with pharyngeal slits; in fish they become gills, in humans they turn into tonsils and parts of the inner ear.  Once I was reading with a group of children and noticed one of the girls had a tiny hole just above the tragus of her ear.  You could just see it when she bent down over the book then brushed her hair back out of the way.  It fascinated me, that tiny hole where none should be.  When I looked it up I learned it was a preauricular pit or preauricular sinus, which is a common congenital malformation. 1 in 100 people have it, and there is even one on the giant ear in Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. They form in the 6th week of development, the same time when our gill slits decide to become something else.  One evolutionary biologist argues that preauricular sinuses are vestigial gills, which is a possibility I would like to believe in.  The tiny black hole in a young girl’s ear a passageway back through time.

My son and I drowse in our primordial tub.  Green, like the first forests.  The warm water soothes us. He is so new. Slippery like a fish. A promise of anything. Once, we were something that scrambled onto land. Who knows what we will become.    

Claire Lawrence is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bloomsburg University with a PhD in Creative Writing Fiction from the University of Houston and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Utah. She has published fiction, poetry, and memoir in numerous magazines including Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, Event Magazine, Terra Nova, Western Humanities Review, Lunch Ticket and Juked. She lives in the forest with her husband, children, and two Pekingeses named Mushu and Kung Pao.