Sarah Salway

tapped

As he gets older, my son doesn’t really speak to me anymore. So when he came back from his school trip saying only that it was OK, I shrugged. It was only out of habit that I asked about his packed lunch, who he sat next to, did he have homework? OK, OK, OK.

But then he blurted out how he’d seen a chick emerge from an egg. It had been in a warm glass box, a nest of eggs, and he had put his ear to the glass to hear the tap tap tap until there’d been a shattering of shell, a beak outstretched, the wobbly, wet emergence of new life even as he’d watched. That had actually been OK, he said, escaping before I could remind him about homework and hair and no screens.

That night, my husband and I surprised each other with our excitement, and so we went to the farm, the next weekend, to see for ourselves. Our son, now our guide, seemed to grow before our eyes into a larger version of himself, substantial now in his role of the one who had seen it all before. And it was just as he’d said: a room full of transparent boxes, each filling itself over and over with yellow chicks, and my son in the middle of it all. His blind yearning for us to love it as much as he did tore at my heart until I cried.

I feel the same, my husband said when he saw my tears, but he didn’t. He couldn’t, because he hadn’t noticed how the chicks had no mothers. That any warmth was pumped there by machines, that all the pain — the tapping, the tapping, the tapping followed by a blinking jolt into an overlit world — was shouldered solely by the chick, who, after that, had to sway lonely and awkward on matchstick legs until a huge hand reached in to scoop it up, to take it to god knows where.

My cheeks were still wet as I told my son that yes, it was OK. Exuberant with birth, my son glowed, laughing at how everywhere we looked chick after chick were tapping their way out. They were all grenades exploding into a future I had no part in.

Sarah Salway is a poet, short story writer and author of three novels, including Something Beginning With. Her writing has been published widely including in The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping, The Poetry of Sex (Penguin Books) and the Financial Times. She is currently a consultant for reading groups with the Royal Literary Fund. Her website is at www.sarahsalway.co.uk.

Sarah wrote the following about ‘Tapped’:

I’ve never forgotten taking my small kids to an open farm one rainy Sunday. To be honest, we were just killing time, but in one barn, we saw chicks hatching out of eggs. It was so magical that I actually felt it deep in my body. When I started writing this story, I wanted to get across what it’s like in those moments when, as a parent, you realise that your child is suddenly growing up, and I remembered those beautiful chicks.