11/30/10

The Tinkle of Your Eye
By Troy Manning


According to my parents, I wasn’t exactly an “oops” and I wasn’t exactly planned. Much of my life has since been an exercise in trying to understand what they meant. But as each direct query to their meaning only met with even more cryptic responses, my tactics have become more experimental in nature. I recall one instance when my mother told me that I was once a Twinkie in my father’s eye. My father corrected her and said I was never his eye’s Twinkie but its apple with which he baked forbidden pie. On another occasion, he sat me down to tell me the story of the early birds and the busy bees. I remember squirming at the plight of the worms as the birds dug them up from their holes while the bees busily injected them with their poison. The worms swelled until they exploded like frenzied car-bombers, and aluminum shards littered the landscapes of unwitting lives like those of my parents. I felt just terrible.

After getting some integrative counseling, I again felt ready to face the world. I ceased to ask my parents for explanations of my origins and instead majored in cellular biology. I learned a lot in that program, about both my cells and yours. I remember, for instance, when we scraped some of the skin from your scalp and looked at it under the microscope. We observed the organisms that lived in your tissue and remarked at how well they all seemed to get on. You said it reminded you of your childhood home in St. Paul and the symbiosis of the relationships displayed therein. When, however, we scraped my head, it was an altogether different story. Do you remember the discord, the dissonance, the disarray? A tear fell from your eye, so we quickly scooped it onto the glass slide for examination. We observed with wonder at how everything seemed to coalesce so harmoniously. The fluid from your eye was like a cleansing flood that swept away the obstreperous players from the stage of my head-tissue, while a quiet, satisfying resolution pervaded the set. The smiles that ornamented the remaining organisms’ visages were something to behold. I took your hand and you didn’t withdraw it. We pledged even then we would never tell our children they were an “oops,” or an auto accident, or a Hostess product. To the contrary, they would be nothing less sublime than the tinkle from your eye.


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Troy Manning is a graduate of Westminster Seminary California. He has recently been taking literature classes at Cal State University, San Marcos where his stories "Edgar's Telegram" and "Head Knowledge" have been published in the creative writing program's Cat Ate My Chapbook and the Spring 2010 issue of Oh, Cat!