‘The Scientific Method’ by Alan Sincic

Long before I read the book about how the father and the mother collide — the diagram of the docking manoeuvre and the pics all prickly with arrows pointing to the tumbler and the spring and the shank — I’d assembled a picture of my own.

You begin with a bun. Bun in the oven. Baby out the body of the mother. But by the time I was ten or so, I knew you need a kind of yeast to make it — the bread, the baby — rise. But where do you get the yeast? Where does it come from? In National Geographic I read about a sponge in the sea, stuck to a rock or whatever, and it releases, like a sneeze, a batch of little spores, a cloud of spores to random off into the open ocean to meet, eventually, the mother sponge. 

The air is an ocean, right? The one thing we all of us share. The one thing we — every single minute — swallow into the centre of the self. And particles. You got particles in the air. Smoke. Clouds. And through the air they travel, and from one person to another. Billions of particles you vacuum into that hollow in the heart of you. 

So over the course of a season I cobbled together a theory.