C4 antho - Chamber Four

~56~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
apparent order and then he described the flagellating sperm
swimming up a woman’s fallopian tubes to penetrate the egg.
The boy’s father used many words that the boy didn’t know:
mitochondria, flagellum, TK inhibitors, implantation, zygote.
The father drew more pictures: the egg halved, then quartered,
then grew into a bunch like grapes or a cluster of frog
eggs. The boy understood that this was how every human
being started, the proliferation of two cells dividing. But the
father forgot to explain the sex part, how the sperm and the
egg got to be in the same place at the same time and so for
years the boy thought the sperm flew out of the man and
through the air to where it entered the woman and multiplied
like cancer.
* * * *
Once the boy was on a playground. The playground had
see-saws and monkey bars and a metal dome of welded triangles.
The boy rode a donkey on a giant spring next to a
plastic turtle. He was waiting for his mother to meet him
halfway from school, like she usually did, sauntering up in
overalls and sandals, her hair in a bun. Three teenage boys
with black or grey t-shirts came up to him. They had chains
on their pockets and their pants hung so low that their
crotches were almost down to their knees. Their hair was
long and un-parted.
“Do you want to see a lizard?” one of them asked.
The boy said yes. He liked lizards. He knew that their ancestors
were dinosaurs and lizards reminded him of these
great ancestors, their regal heads and their bones in the
Tyrell museum that he had been to with his class. Yes, he
wanted to see a lizard. They were rare in Alberta; in fact, he
couldn’t remember ever seeing one out in the wild―only in
interpretive centers or zoos.