The expression on her face was unusual. A kind of satisfying smile under her eyes that avoided other people's gazes. She was about forty-five years old. She left a vague impression that she had once been an attractive girl who had probably been the target of lustful glances, someone's loving eyes, or at least an erect penis.
What now attracted attention to her, besides her drunk and too slim of a body, grotesque makeup, and uncertainty in appearance, was her baby, from whom no one had ever seen her part from. Everywhere she went, she went with her little one. Well swaddled and in a safe maternal embrace. Protected from everything she considered a threat to the little one...like many mothers, she had that expression that is incomprehensible to men. No one knew who the baby's father was, whether it was a soldier on leave, the love of her life, or the local bored Council house fucker. It was strange that she was not the target of gossip, except for the newcomers to the city who were seeing her for the first time...
The mystery was revealed one ordinary rainy day on the steps in front of the local hospital. For reasons forever buried in her mind, she often hung around the city hospital.
No, there were no dramas or confrontations with the baby's possible father. No fateful encounters, at least not the kind that novels are written about, are retold as the latest gossip or end up on the pages of the black chronicle.
Just a small slip on the slippery stairs. And a shock. Shock when she slipped and fell down the stairs. For the first time in who knows how long, the baby, under the influence of inexorable gravity, left her arms and rolled down the stairs. It remained lying down on them, between the expression in the mother's eyes, some essence of horror, stopped time in her eyes and the shock of those who witnessed the incident. The baby remained lying. At first she didn't move. Despite the fall that engulfed all the stairs one by one. The baby didn't make a sound. And how could it have made a sound when it was made of - plastic!
It wasn't any baby, but an ordinary doll, a little old-fashioned and worn out. Plastic is not prone to injuries.
Collateral damage to the invisible whims of fate, drug addict`s stories from another time, an insidious game of chance, a karmic incident with no return ticket, like all of us, although all in our own way, carrying our cross as long as we have some illusion in front of us. Even if we have some kind of plastic doll in our hands, we also have something that makes us not stop. Not to break the circle.
An insignificant scene from an insignificant street in a small, gray town on the border with the promised land. A sad inspiration in the brain of an hydraulic press worker during a cigarette break.
(Roger Mortis 016)
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