“Tunnels” by Emily Sinclair (fiction ’14)
An excerpt from “Tunnels” by Emily Sinclair (fiction ’14), published by Atticus Review.
Tunnels
Opening
O tunnels! Mysterious and misunderstood. We don’t love you for your very own selves. We only love you for what you do for us, the way you get us from Point A to Point B. You connect the past to the future. But you are mere means to an end, a place we visit only to escape.
BOrn
The birth canal is the first tunnel. It prepares us for the ones that come after. From the darkness there arises an inchoate and intuitive sense of destination, a drive, without understanding of what awaits. We can only go forward, into the bright unknown. The future is unimaginable.
When I was born, the mothers were routinely given drugs that made them sleep through delivery. In expulsion, the mother gives life. This is her job: to hold her child close and then to push her out.
