Welcome to the Universe.
“Oh, hello,” said the man, as he bit into a pear. “Welcome to the universe.”
Felipe blinked four times - stared up at the man who looked down at him from underneath a brown brimmed hat - and gurgled. Felipe’s two small hands had fingers that looked like small sea creatures wiggling in the waves, tucked beside his cheeks in the swaddling.
“Well, I see this is going to be somewhat of a one sided conversation,” the man said with a cavalier tone.
Felipe’s fingers stopped wriggling about and his eyes began to shut. For a moment, his eyelids flashed open, then closed, then his tiny feathery lashes rested upon his skin and he pursed his lips a few times to confirm he was, indeed, asleep.
“That’s the silly thing about babies,” said the man. “They never want to talk about anything unless they initiate the interactions. Inequality is infinite with infants.”
A woman, passing by, stopped to marvel at the baby. A smile smoothed across her face as she approached the pram.
“Don’t bother,” the man said, throwing his pear core into a nearby bin. “He’s hardly a conversationalist and he falls asleep faster than a drunk after ten too many drinks.”
Assuming a joke had been told, the woman laughed while the man began pushing the pram away from her in the opposite direction.
The smile that had illustrated itself upon her face made room for an arch between her eyebrows and a small gap between her lips.
The man strode through the park, nodding at the squirrels and avoiding any gazes that may cross his own.
He took out a breath mint - placing it to the right side of his mouth - and walked at full clip towards the pond. As he walked, a small flock of wasps became attracted to his mouth, causing him to wave both his hands in front of his face to deter their efforts to penetrate his lips. His attempts to distract the wasps were futile. One especially determined bee succeeded in piercing him on the lips.
The reaction was instant. The man’s body jerked against the pram as his hands flew up towards his mouth, where he’d been shot by the natural ammunition of mother nature. Away went the pram, down, down, down, until it skidded onto the dirt, heaving itself into the pond water as Felipe’s eyes opened again.
When his eyes focused above him, Felipe did not see the man with the brown brimmed hat. Instead, he saw the inside of his pram’s canopy and a liquid substance that began to gather around his swaddling.
His fingers became sea creatures under the pond water, and his eyes again flickered shut once more.
And that was the day Felipe was welcomed to the universe.
