The Wrong End of the Bargain

The foal was standing before Maya had finished her sandwich.

"That's not right," she said, mouth full. "It came out an hour ago."

Soren checked his watch against the note he'd made when Aunt Bel called them out to the barn. "Fifty-two minutes."

The foal wobbled, splayed its legs like a card table someone had kicked, and then just stood there, wet and blinking, taller than a dog. Its mother licked its neck. Nobody was helping it. Nobody needed to.

"Fifty-two minutes," Maya said. "Eli is four months old."

Eli was her cousin. He was in the house right now, in the crook of her mother's arm, and if you didn't hold his head it flopped backward like the head of a doll with a loose spring. Four months, and he couldn't do the one thing this soaking-wet horse had done before it was an hour into being alive.

"Horses are prey animals," Soren said. He'd read this somewhere. "If they can't run, something eats them. So they come out ready."

"Okay." Maya put down the sandwich. "But we're not prey. Nothing's eating us. So why do we come out worse? Why does a baby horse work and a baby person doesn't?"

Soren opened his mouth to say humans just develop slowly, and then didn't, because that wasn't an answer. That was the thing that needed answering, said in a fancier voice.

"It's backwards," Maya said. "We're supposed to be the smart ones. We build barns. The horse doesn't build the barn. And the horse's baby comes out finished and ours comes out like, like a sketch."

"A rough draft," Soren said.

"A rough draft." She liked that. "Eli's a rough draft of a person."

Aunt Bel came over, wiping her hands on a towel. "Miracle, isn't it."

"It's suspicious," Maya said.

Aunt Bel laughed and went to get the vet on the phone, which meant she was gone, which was fine. Aunt Bel knew horses. She did not know why Eli's head didn't work, and Maya could tell she'd never once wondered.

Soren was watching the foal's legs. "Look how long they are. It's mostly leg. It got born with the leg part already done." He crouched. "What's the part of us that's not done?"

"His head," Maya said. "His neck can't hold his head. His head's too heavy."

They both went quiet.

"His head's too heavy," Maya said again, slower.

Soren pulled out the notebook. He drew a circle, big, and under it a stick of a neck, and the neck bent over sideways under the weight of the circle. "The head's the smart part. The brain part." He tapped the circle. "So the smart part is the heavy part. And the heavy part is the part that's not finished."

"So we come out early," Maya said.

"What?"

"We come out early. Eli's a rough draft because he got printed before he was done. The horse waited. We didn't wait." She grabbed the notebook and looked at the fat circle of the head. "Why wouldn't we wait? If waiting makes the strong finished baby, why does everybody, every single person who has ever been born, come out too early?"

"Because we couldn't wait longer," Soren said. He said it the way you say something a half-second before you understand it. Then he understood it. "Because the head's already almost too big."

"Too big for what?"

Soren stood up. He walked a few steps, watching his own hips move. "For getting out. It has to fit through. There's a, there's a hole it has to come through, in the bones, in the hips." He put his hands on his own hip bones. "And our hips are like this because we stand up. We walk on two legs. The horse walks on four, its hips can be any shape, huge, whatever. Ours have to hold us up standing."

Maya was standing too now, her hands on her own hips, feeling the bones there, narrow, the bones that let her run and jump and stand at the barn door.

"So the hips got narrow so we could walk," she said, "and the head got big so we could be smart, and the head got too big for the narrow hips."

"So the baby has to come out," Soren said, "before the head finishes growing. Before it's too big to fit. That's why Eli's a rough draft. He had to leave early or he'd never get out at all."

The foal took a step. A real step, then another, following its mother along the fence, fifty-three minutes old and going for a walk.

Maya looked at the barn, at the fence, at the tractor parked crooked in the yard, at the house where Eli was lying in her mother's arm being completely, helplessly useless.

"He's not a rough draft," she said.

"No."

"He's the price." She turned the word over. "The horse got a finished baby because it never learned anything. It just runs. We come out broken because the part that isn't finished is the part that's going to build barns." She pointed at the crooked tractor. "And the phone. And the barn. All of it. Every single thing anybody ever made. It was made by a rough draft."

Soren looked at his own hand, opening and closing it. "Every person who ever did anything, came out too early and couldn't hold up their own head."

"Every one." Maya was almost laughing, the strange kind. "The whole thing, all of it, everything anybody's ever figured out, it only happens because we get born wrong."

"Not wrong."

"You know what I mean. Unfinished. On purpose. We trade the running for the barn."

The screen door banged. Maya's mother came out onto the porch with Eli, holding his head the way you have to, one hand flat behind the loose heavy skull, and the sun was on both of them.

Maya walked over. Her mother started to say something about miracles, the same word Aunt Bel used, and Maya wasn't listening. She held out her arms.

"Support his head," her mother said.

"I know," Maya said, and took him, one hand under the too-heavy, unfinished, still-growing head, and held the part of him that wasn't done yet, that would take twenty years to finish, that was already the reason for the barn and the tractor and the phone.

Eli looked up at her and couldn't hold his own gaze steady, and his head pressed warm and heavy into her palm.