New story multi-chapter although the chapters itself can be attributed as one-shots. Side not for anyone who has read Cafe-au-lait, Hears who sing out loud and Balloon and children are messy business, I will hopefully be going over them these next couple days and rewriting a majority of it, and hopefully adding a new chapter to all three. So look out for that. No promises though. I've been having horrible writers block and I feel this may have helped so enjoy this selection. I enjoyed writing it!

Twenty three had been a struggling year for Hoagie. Two years before he had married his sweetheart despite his mother's protest to wait it out a little longer, but he knew he loved this woman, a woman he wanted to grow old with, squabble with, comfort, be comforted by. Never had it crossed his mind the thought of children, bleakly they talked about it, in brisk, uncomfortable rushed conversations- she wasn't afraid to have her body change forever- to be torn or stretched in order to house something beautiful.

He could imagine it, she would be one of those beautiful pregnant women who always seemed to glow with a little fetus growing inside of her. The type of woman who would sing lullabies to her growing stomach, jokingly admit she was eating for two as she lay her fingers so sweetly against the swollen skin. Smile gratefully over the grimace of uncomfortable bodily changes occurring, for what she housed in her body was so much more- than anything she could ascribe. Her child he could easily see it. She was a kid person, she could understand them despite their stutters and gap teeth lisp, comfort their tears with soft cooing noises and prattle and play, throw them justly hard as their little bodies could take as fun into a sea of mud and smile so smugly as she threw childish remarks with them.

She was the kind of woman who you expected kids from. The type who saw labor as child's play. But Hoagie, he wasn't worried about her genes she was the perfect biological weapon to have children- he on the other hand was not. Gangly, awkward either to delicate and boorish to keeps a child attention or much to snarky and brusque. He wasn't good with kids, he didn't get them, didn't understand them-and those little things, small specimen of humans frightened him to pieces.

Admittedly he knew he was the type of man who didn't know a lot about children, at least not scientifically. A man of science a man of concrete theories just couldn't fathom, couldn't conceptualize the way children worked-how they thought if they even thought at all. And how was he to readily bring a child into the world, raise it to be an upstanding citizen if he knew nothing of how its mind worked . He tried to understand them, sat through cousin Amelia's tea parties, Little cousin Brian's seasonal baseball league practices, but still knew nothing about those, strange little sprightly creatures who could go from the anomaly of wet molt tears to brimming smiles in two point three seconds.

Hoagie was a child once he reasoned, he did things- sometimes very stupid inexplicable things but couldn't conclude his thoughts to be evident. Afterall childhood had been almost a millennia ago and was as blurry and allusive as the trembling butterflies wrenching up in waves deep in the belly of his chest.

Twenty three had been a very difficult time, he wanted to comfort his wife whose puking sessions of her first trimesters still gave him shivers and suspended his heart to a wave of guilt every time she dry heaved what was left of her lunch. Guilty that it was partly his fault she was in this situation; Hoagie had always been a lightweight drinker afterall, guilty that even though he said it he wouldn't want to switch places with her if it was possible ; guilty that he knew it was a biological response of her body trying to sustain a safe heaven for the impossibly small fetus in her body.

He was resentful of their status at twenty three, angry at the woman who so normally posed what good parents they make for their baby; statistics says young couples; new age mixed-race don't last long with children present, Abby cried then and he hated it. Hated how easily his wife crumbled the pillar of his strength at words of woman they didn't know, angry that he couldn't understand joy of baby's heartbeat or a kicks when science proves this to be a normal biological phenononom of the second term; angry that he reasoned his future wasn't as concrete and conceptualized as he first believed.

She had been restless last few days asked, almost begged him to stay with her- as he at twenty three turned away from her stated that he never asked to be a father. He was afraid she wouldn't love him anymore, she didn't slap nor yell at him, simply place his cold damp fingers onto her impossibly round belly, Afraid when she faced her back to him and coughed with such a rough throaty sound, feverish in her sleep as he whispered sweet nothing to her, afraid when she cried out in pain hours later a month in half early, because the baby was just to big and she was just to small to carry him any longer.

Seven hours later there son was born, wet and bloody screaming out to the world in words only Hoagie could hear in his surrealism. "I'm alive, I'm here!" How Abby had cried out, shrieked in a happiness that went beyond her features, the numbness, the prickling of his skin as the doctors almost stole him away- his son. A possessiveness he had never felt before.

He wanted to attribute it all to science, there had to be a biological, physiological reason children behaved like children, why he had behaved the way he did, the wave of stagnating euphoria, bliss, trepidation as he counted the little fingers and toes, thinking this red patchy few minute old baby is the most beautiful creature in the world- science the stalk and grain of human knowledge declared many reasons for the behavior of children but he still couldn't fathom, couldn't come to wrap his hand around the information of children as he done so easily so instinctively with the small squashy ball of human he held bewildered in his arms. It was a child- well one small metamorphosis from childhood; at least so he thought at the time. A baby he was a holding a baby, not just any baby but his baby- his and Abby's baby a child who had been conceived into the womb of a woman he loved dearly. Their baby, their son, their baby boy. He couldn't understand it; he didn't look like the movies all pale and shiny and new nor all freaky and unsettling as the text book diagrams- but he was beautiful under that veil of wrinkled red skin, blind unseasoned blue eyes squinty and frightened and adorably cute with his frowning puckered lips and tiny pudgy little fingers that gripped onto his chin pinching him in a way as if to say it was all real.

He would understand eventually.