The stork messed up for my brother and me.
They say the stork is a legend but they say a lot of things and none of them explain how Julian and I came to life. So maybe the stork is real. Maybe the stork uses his big beak to stitch up babies, to connect their fingers to their hands and their toes to their feet. Maybe the stork sits on babies to keep them warm the way Pringles sits on the new mice.
And then the stork drops the babies into homes where moms wait holding out their arms. And if the babies fall into the right place, boom. That’s their family. That’s when they’re born.
But the stork missed with Julian and me. He stitched us too late. Our fingers were too big. Our heads were full grown. And when the stork dropped us, we landed outside a mom and outside a house. We landed somewhere where there was no one to say “hey, look, kids!” and so we grew. I grew a little faster. Julian stayed a bit behind.
We grew in that abandoned spot, that empty yard or parking lot or mountain or desert where the stork dropped us by accident. We grew bigger and stronger and we slept sitting up with our knees pressed together. We fed each other and talked to each other. We grew and grew until the Division of Family Services found us and said, “If you don’t have a mother, that means you’re ours.”
Julian and I are just like everyone. Or we would have been. If the stork didn’t mess up.