November is Prematurity Awareness month, for what it's worth. In my writing class, I did an exercise describing an object with sentimental meaning, and describe it for five days without looking back to see what I had written previously:
It fits in the palm of her hand. A perfect impression, the plaster only
crumbling along one edge. How
could feet that small belong to a person?
The tiny lines and creases preserved. The plaster is grey, but the memory is pink feet. Tiny human pink feet already scarred
with needle holes. Pink feet
against a background of florescent lights, machines beeping, digital numbers
rising and falling on monitors. the footprints sit in plaster, in a box, in
tissue paper.
Wrapped in pink tissue paper in a
closet on a shelf in a crate in another box, in another box. “It must be in here.” Something so
important must be here where it should be. She digs past the vacuum cleaner with the canister that
crashes off, past the wrapping paper, past the weights. It’s not in the torn cardboard box, not
in the shopping bag, but in the orange crate. She digs, unpacks, and lifts. Uncovered. A
tiny plaster cast of two feet. Perfect feet with lines and creases. Like human feet, in tissue, in a box,
in a box, in plaster
The footprints fit in her
hand. Gray plaster in the shape of a scallop shell, the impression of the
feet creased and veined. She imagines what she did not see. The
nurse, name forgotten, releases the side panel on the isolette. She
strokes the baby's head and moves the wires to the side. Her gloved hands
lift the baby's feet. Deftly into the plaster and back out. Did the
nurse sing or coo? Did she rock a startled baby? The footprints don’t
remember.
Tiny footprints preserved
in plaster—gray toes and lines and creases like real feet. The real feet attached to the baby were
pink and in motion, scarred by needles, taped down, glowing with a pulse ox,
kicking and pushing. The plaster
feet stay still and silent.
Footprints in a scallop shell. Tiny feet preserved in gray, toes and
lines and creases, perfect and silent.
“Mama, mama, mama” four years later she doesn’t sleep at bedtime. Dirty feet in purple butterfly
flipflops as the leaves fall.
Chipped nail polish feet in motion kicking and crunching leaves. Dirty feet thump and run overhead long
past bedtime. Plaster feet stay wrapped in tissue paper in a box in a box in a
closet.
