Double Waking

So anxious to get born, one broke his water while the other somersaulted further adrift, absconding with his private ocean. Tiny, yes, but both elementally human, Joseph yanked into our world a bare minute after Mateo, his bare brother, both in it for life now. Penny’s daughter, in her bed next door to the ward nursery, woke and heard Mateo yowl. “Oh, my little sweetheart,” she moaned, a tone that rolled my own grown heart till crack. That night I woke to find Mateo asleep beside me, his head on my pillow, his lips spread in an impossible smile, his gnomic face scrunched up, a furling sail; then, in an impossible clambering over Penny to bunk between us came Joseph. We watched them breathe the strange thin atmosphere till I woke again, the breaking of our liquid lives on a sharp edge out there waiting, a waking from our dream of our awaking.