The Unfinished Year

The foal stood up nine minutes after it was born. Maya knew because the 4-H sign on the stall said so, in marker, with a little exclamation point.

Nine minutes. She watched it now, two hours old, walking. Wobbly, but walking. Following its mother around the straw on legs like folded umbrellas.

In the next stall a goat kid did the same thing. In the one after that, a calf.

Maya turned around. Behind her, through the open door of the fair's quiet room, her aunt sat in a plastic chair holding baby Theo, who was four days old.

Theo could not hold up his own head.

"Watch this," Maya said to Soren, and she was not smiling, which meant she was working.

Soren came over with his notebook already open. He looked at the foal. He looked at Theo. His pen stopped.

"That's wrong," he said.

"Which one."

"I don't know yet." He flipped back a page. "The horse is younger than Theo. By two days. And it can walk."

"And run," said the 4-H girl mucking the stall. "Foals can outrun a person by the end of the first day. Has to. Out in the wild, anything that can't keep up with the herd gets eaten."

Soren wrote that down. Maya watched Theo's head loll against her aunt's arm, heavy as a wet apple, and her aunt's hand slide up automatically to cradle it.

"Auntie," Maya said. "When can he hold his head up?"

"Few months," her aunt said, not looking up. "Sit up around six. Walk around a year. You walked late. Drove your mother crazy."

A year. The foal had done it in nine minutes.

Maya sat down on an overturned bucket. She had a list in her head of things that did not make sense yet, and this had just gone to the top.

"Soren. Why are we so bad at this?"

"At being born?"

"At being born." She gestured at the whole barn. Every animal in it had arrived more finished than they had. "We're supposed to be the smart ones. We make the signs with the exclamation points. And our babies come out worse than goats."

Soren chewed his pen. This was the part he liked, the part where something was clearly behaving wrong and he had to find which thing.

"Maybe it's not the baby that's the problem," he said slowly. "Maybe it's us."

"Us how."

"Walk over there." He pointed across the room. "No. Walk like the goat walks."

Maya got down on all fours and crossed the floor, which got a laugh from the 4-H girl, and Maya did not care, because the second her hands hit the ground she felt it.

"My back is flat," she said. "When I'm a goat my whole middle is just, like, a shelf."

"Right." Soren was drawing fast now, a goat-shape, a person-shape. "And the baby comes out the bottom. Off the back end. Nothing in the way."

Maya stood back up. Stood up like a human, straight, stacked, her head balanced right on top of her spine.

"And when I stand up," she said.

"Everything folds." Soren turned the notebook so she could see. He'd drawn the goat's pelvis wide and open like a doorway. Then the human one, tipped up under the body to carry the weight of standing, narrowed, bent, a hallway with a corner in it. "The way out got smaller. Because we stood up."

Maya looked at Theo's head again. That heavy, heavy head.

"And the way out got smaller," she said, "right when the thing that has to fit through it got bigger."

The barn noise seemed to go quiet around her, the way it does when two facts that you've been holding in separate hands suddenly turn out to be the same fact.

"The brain," she said. "That's the whole point of us. The big brain. The exclamation points. And the big brain means a big head, and the big head can't fit through the hallway with the corner in it."

Soren stopped writing. "So it comes out early."

"It has to come out early." Maya was talking fast now, she couldn't help it. "Theo isn't broken. Theo isn't a bad goat. Theo got evicted. He's not finished because if he waited till he was finished, if he waited till his head was foal-sized, he'd never get out at all."

Her aunt was listening now, half a smile on her tired face. "They do call it the fourth trimester," she said. "First three months out, you're basically still supposed to be in there."

Maya turned that over. Theo was four days old. By that math he had eighty-six days left of a pregnancy that was already over. He was finishing himself out here, in the open air, in a plastic chair at a county fair, where a foal his age was already running.

"Soren." She said it quietly. "Every single person. Every single one. Came out unfinished. Everybody walking around this fair. Every grown-up. They all started like that." She pointed at Theo's wobbling head. "Heavy head, can't sit up, finishing on the outside."

"That's the trade," Soren said. He looked almost stunned by it. "You get the brain. But you have to come out before you're done. You don't get one without the other."

"Which means," Maya said, and here it was, the top of the list, the thing that made her arms prickle, "the reason we're smart enough to wonder about this is the exact same reason we're born too soon to know anything."

They both looked at the baby.

Theo was awake. His unfocused eyes were drifting across the ceiling beams, across the hanging lights, not landing, not knowing what a beam was or a light was or a barn was. The foal in the next stall folded its long legs and lay down, finished, complete, knowing everything a foal would ever need to know.

Maya crouched down by the plastic chair so her face was level with the baby's.

Theo's small hand had come loose from the blanket. She put her finger against his palm, and his fingers closed around it, hard, a grip from a million years before the corner in the hallway, holding on the way the foal would never need to hold on to anything.