Excerpt || The Singular Life of Eddy Dovewater
Agog! Terrific Tales, Agog! Press, Cat Spark ed., 2003
Ditmar Award Best Short Story shortlist
Eddy Dovewater was born running. Squeeze. Slide. Slap.
An obligatory wail of disgust and he was free. Exiting the obstetrics
ward, he was clocked at nearly fifteen km/hour. Not bad for his height.
Forty-five centimetres of baby-pink blur.
"And I thought I'd seen everything," said
the midwife, rocking back on her heels. "Now, where's he going in
such a hurry?"
But to Eddy's pre-verbal brain, it wasn't so much
where he was going, as where he was coming from. Eddy Dovewater had been
born before. And this time, he was determined to stay alive.
He might have been short, but he was fast. Spun between
the legs of a hospital aide before anybody even began to react. Left the
nurse for dust. Still slippery with amniotic fluid, he slid under a guernsey
and into the corridor, dodging two astonished ambulance drivers.
By then, Mrs Dovewater had blearily managed to raise
her head from the pillow.
"All right, then?" she asked, meaning: is
it over yet?
Doctor Kavendar, hands still held out towards the
Dovewater womb, ignored her with professional ease.
"We've got a runner!" he shouted, dropping
his gloves to the floor with a wet smack.
The door was swinging in Eddy's wake. Doc Kavendar
leapt through and into the corridor, just in time to catch a glimpse of
Eddy's firm pink bottom disappearing around a corner.
"Forceps!" he shouted. He grabbed a pair
of cruel metal fingers from the midwife's collection and took off, white
coat flapping. He used to run at med school. They called him Stringbean.
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