child on the floor

The littlest member of drawing group was handed over in a hurry and he settled down, put his sticky little hands up on my neck and his face on my chest and decided seemed he liked it. When he woke up I put him down and since then every time we meet and draw when he is hauling himself around under the table he looks up and even if I’m frowning with concentration he just gazes at me with these big juicy one-tooth grins. He likes to put my discarded shoes in his wet mouth because that is how babies converse with this world. I was pregnant once after longing forever for a child and that child’s father who is two metres tall got angry and jostled me in a doorway and roared and shouted and I refused to cower but stood up to him saying I dare you, too proud to remind him I am with child and then he knocked me to the ground in our tiny house and walloped me over the head with a book so hard he broke its spine and I miscarried and that child will now never be born and I miss the joy and the tedious frustration and the chance to love and care for her or for him, every day, and I will be sad not all the time but every week about the death of this life I carried inside me here until the afternoon of the day I die.