a a a a a

uh ee uh ee uh ee

yaki yak iyagi oh nooo. yiwa eeya ouuyah.

ay ya you—i lah lou—ya yaah ay do ah. ooh ee oh oiy! 

yaki yak, yaki yak, gowin cockalilly.

yaki yak, yaki yak, sloshing sound in the mouth for sheer pleasure. Before they speak words, young children bend air into joy, delighting in the slippery jelly of y’s glide out of its cradle at the back of the throat. Utterly distinct is the coughing pinch of k, which gently stops voice’s juicy shiver until ee’s bright surge—yaki yak, yaki yak. Dat, baba: the boing of breath glances up against language. Soon our stem-syllables split and effloresce. Ba begets ball, bam bam, Bob, bottle, bird, baa baa black sheep. Bee buzzes in, and beetle not long after. Wasp, whale, blubber, blabber, baleen.

We formed as we would someday learn to speak. A single-celled zygote cleaves into two cells, then four, then eight, then sixteen. This solid ball is called a morula, from the Latin morus, because it looks like a clump of drupelets, those soft fruity beads that make up a mulberry. Once an internal cavity forms, the cells, heretofore unspecialised, sort themselves into two camps: a spherical shell, called the trophectoderm, surrounds the blob that will become the embryo. Before long the cells claim their future positions: I will be a right arm when I grow up, I call dibs on left foot, I stand for the role of small intestine.

This growth is writing. As a cell prepares to divide…