If Edwin my eldest brother had ever been born

 

 

If Edwin my eldest brother had ever been born, he would have been a year older than me. My father, a medical student, had his study beneath the stairs, his window a basement window and his specimens sealed in jars:

            —a tiny fetus in a translucent sac

            —a small fetus, pale-fisted, white

            —Edwin

            I point him out to my friends. "Look, that's Edwin, my older brother, if he'd been born."

I think he would have been taller, thinner than me and with short hair. Edwin going before me, growing taller, moving through the neighbourhood. He'd score goals, talk to our neighbours at their side door. I know Dad would have taken Edwin to the golf-driving range, then let him come with to the pub.

            Dad sawed down a club for him in the garage, then taped up the handle, my father showing him how to hold it: line up your thumbs like this, Edwin.

            Down at the other end of the street, "Hey, that's Edwin's younger brother, okay, you' re it, one one-thousand, two."

          A miscarriage. They tried to have Edwin before they had me. It was like he went away to a foreign country and though he was alive, we never saw him, just knew what he was like. And that baby in the jar, was Edwin before he was born, and what he left behind him when our thoughts of Edwin grew bigger.

            I miss him. I think of all the times we could have had, all the things I could have asked him. What would it have been like to have him in the next room with his door open doing homework?

            I don't know what happened to him after we moved to Canada. My father didn't have a study until we moved again and there wasn't a shelf below the window like before.

          I still imagine Edwin back on that shelf with some kids looking in. They go the street and play football until they're called home for supper.

 

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I wrote this text when I was in my late teens and it formed the content of one of my first serif of nottingham chapbooks. My grandfather used to sometimes call me Edwin because that was the name of a kid who lived next door to him in South Africa, where he lived. My father really did have jars of fetuses in his downstairs study, though I suspect they were all animal fetuses. He did have a real human skeleton, though. My mom also did have a miscarriage before me. So, all of these things became mixed together and part of my childhood thoughts which I allowed to freely wander into this story.