Straight No Chaser

X, X, X

"ah, hell, post it," he said. something to that effect. anyway, permission granted, decision made:

"Even before the first baby arrived they could tell he’d be a smart one by the way he timed his kicks, using them to punctuate interesting lines from the novels Shannon would read aloud on long road trips. In those days they drove back and forth from the Midwest to the East Coast pretty often; they hadn’t quite finished integrating their spatially divergent lives, and with the baby coming, flying was out of the question. They made it through four more Eugenides bestsellers that way, canning the series when they agreed the author had said all he had to say. That’s when they started in on the classics, collecting elegantly bound hardback editions at roadside bookstores, and though they never discussed it, their clear purpose was literary edification for the kid.

So they knew he’d be smart, but weren’t expecting an infant prodigy; he shocked them at two by jumping into the philosophical debates they held with the hippie couple next door, his golden skin aglow as Aaron lifted him up over the lot-dividing fence to hear better. He had sparkling hazel eyes, sandy hair, and an aptitude for the humanities that shocked even the teachers at the gifted preschool on Flower Street. Within three months of his third birthday he was reading with no trouble; not long after, he’d started composing and illustrating simple stories on the construction paper pads Shannon kept stocked on his miniature bookcase.

Shannon and Aaron left him with relatives when they went coffeeshop- and barhopping on weekends, seeking out good music, stimulating conversation and, occasionally, karaoke. Shannon almost never drank, but when she did, Aaron almost never had trouble talking her into an off-key, off-color his-and-hers duet onstage, and never resisted teasing her about it later.

When the girl was born two months premature, breathing problems kept her in an incubator for a few weeks, reason enough for Aaron to quit smoking and never look back. They picked a name they hoped would highlight her unusual features—smooth, caramel-colored skin topped off with thick honey blond curls, deep green eyes and a perpetual rosy blush—but second-guessed themselves the minute the birth certificate had been finalized. Aaron said it sounded like a stripper name. Shannon disagreed, but secretly thought prostitute. More often than not, they—and her older brother—just called her Baby.

They still traveled back and forth for grandparent visits, just not as often. When they did, the kids’ favorite game was “patchwork story,” in which each of the four players took turns adding lines to a story Aaron had prompted at the beginning of the drive. The boy’s sentences were always longest, each one winding through every corner of his mental vocabulary cache; Baby’s invariably sent their stories spinning off into bizarre supernatural and sci-fi directions, landing them on Jupiter or at human cloning facilities in Roswell, New Mexico. (How, at as young as five, she knew a thing about Roswell, they could only guess.)

He grew up to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after writing The Quintessential Pan-Terrestrial Novel, the work that proved responsible for unifying every last world nation. She grew up to cure AIDS and end hunger in third world countries. Shannon and Aaron were very proud."

drop those eyebrows. we're not picking china patterns or anything. we haven't even picked an island yet.