Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Little guy in a big world

"Manuel," she answered when I asked what her little two-and-a-half-foot ball of energy's name was. I looked down at a three year old inquisitively wandering all over the cold, painfully white exam room. I studied his face as he cocked his head to look up at me and mutter something in perfect Spanglish - he reminded me of a little squirrel monkey. A long, oval face, with high, flat cheekbones and a short, snub nose; black, black, black eyes like lopsided teardrops; smooth, lightly copper skin, and thick, erect hair bristling around his head. He was a looker, no mistake, in more ways than one. I glanced at the thin, withdrawn woman beside me (his aunt, apparently) and suddenly sensed how overwhelmed she must be by his constant energy and curiosity. It was clear nobody curbed him at home, but then I'm not sure you can curb the kind of intense motion this little boy had. It was touch, touch, touch, one thing after another, expressions and mimicked expressions flashing across his pointy-chinned face in quick succession. And then that constant needed to share what he discovered - showing, pointing, babbling away to both of us in a hybrid language neither could understand. He wasn't the first child I'd seen that was linguistically confused - a number of the Hispanic children in our clinics grew up mixing Spanish and English to such an extent that they switch as often as every couple words, making understanding challenging at best.

Suddenly, Manuel froze. The nurse was taking aunty's blood pressure. He watched, eyes fixed on the cuff, face unreadable, then skittered over to her arm as as the cuff came off, to touch it and see what had happened, what might be different. Then froze again. Nurse was taking aunty's pulse. I tried to show him on my own wrist what she was doing, pressing his fingers first to my pulse, then his. "Pulse," I said, "pulso," trying to get my meaning, or least a general idea, across that confused language connection of a young child in a bilingual world. He touched my pulse, touched his, parroted both words, and was off. There were so many other things to see.

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