A LAKE IS BORN
corby anderson
The emergency room was in chaos. Nowhere in any of the podiatry manuals that I vaguely knew was there a section about how to give birth while fighting off a very large and agitated bird in the dark with only warm whiskey and a few tablets of Oxycontin at your disposal.
The bird was an emu, and it was the least of my problems. The ranch vet had heard of the crisis, and had thrown up a table in the barn that housed the giant chickens. They had escaped the grasp of the fat old vet, and one had him pinned in the hay while the other menaced my birthing station.
The teenager finally pushed with everything that she had. She screamed and her back leapt up off of the card table and out came the human head into my awaiting hands. An emu looked over my shoulder; and clucked as I cradled the infant and cleared it’s mouth.
“I wanna call it Lake,” the girl said. She was bleeding too much, and since it wasn’t coming from her foot, I was not going to be able to fix it.
“After Lake Palisade, where I done it with his Pa.”
Corby Anderson lives in Marina, California, where he is proud to get up every morning and shave his once hairy chin in order to continue to look the part of the corporate A/V man that he is. When he isn't shaving or working (or both), he hides out in a drafty old military sub-station that is guarded with ill tempered Poison Oak, high above Palo Colorado Canyon, overlooking the Big Sur coast. There he writes his first novel and tries not to scratch. His journal, filled with excerpts, letters, poetry, and other drivel can be found at myspace. com/desertsky7.