Hide and Seek, Neil Carpathios

Impatient for it to hatch, every morning I’d rush to where it lay on grass, nudge it with a stick to wake the baby I pictured curled up sleeping. But it never moved. I heard a tick inside. I pictured the chick flicking on a lamp to read his little instruction book on how to be what he’d be—a bird. Chapter One: Catching Worms. Chapter Two: How to Build a Nest. Chapter Three: How to Recognize Windows and Not Smash Glass. And so on. I got tired of waiting. I took a rock and mashed it into yellow goo. Then I poked through embryonic slime and bits of broken shell, determined to find the book every living thing must read. It all comes back, as hands and feet against my inner walls kick, punch, scratch. Something pushes me apart. I start to see. When all our secret places were used, we found a new way to fool each other: we grew adult bodies to hide inside.

NEIL CARPATHIOS is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Confessions of a Captured Angel (Terrapin Books, 2016) and Far Out Factoids (FutureCycle Press, 2017). Additionally, his most recent chapbook,The Function of Sadness, won the 2015 Slipstream Press Chapbook Competition. In 2014, he edited the anthology Every River on Earth: Writ- ing from Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press). He teaches at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio. About his essay, “Hide and Seek,” Carpathios writes, “The piece springs from the childhood memory of impatiently waiting for a discovered egg to hatch and imagining what was going on inside that shell. Later, in adulthood, I began to realize how we, as adults, often exist inside our own shells, hiding our true selves from the world. The act of hatching, then, is one of liberation and birth in the literal and emotional sense.”