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An hour later I leave
to clean the sunroom. This is the children's
playroom, now empty. Around me the carpet, the plastic chairs and tables
are covered with the daytime patterns of childhood, lingering. Toys and
pieces of toys lay here and there, always everywhere, weaving together
messy spirals and rhythms and textures. Yellow, red, blue. Mini-houses,
Ken heads, Fisher-Price farms, hollow plastic bulbs-some together, some
not. I pick them up, one by one, and put them in their designated places.
I used to work the evening shift here, just after supper, when the sunroom
is full of children, of wet hair and pajamas; movement and noise;
tricycles, story-books, gossip; house, cops, robbers; tossing, chasing,
shouting. John, John, John, they called from all corners, all sides. The
supervisor's big butt, Dan's booger, Kara's farts. Faster and faster, the
kinetic energy of their play seemed to raise the small hairs on my neck
and arms ... But I'd forget. On the mat, near the television, would be
the other patients like Dean. Quiet, except for tiny rockings from
seizures or masturbation. Movement would flurry about them, balls would
accidentally bounce off their heads as we nursing assistants played with
the other children; all of us believing, hoping, that because these
patients lay quietly, just breathing and rocking, they were pacified. With
bright colors spinning around us, we would tuck them and their gnarled
fingers into the back of our minds and forget them. But here on the night
shift I remember.
Reprinted with permission
from Creative Nonfiction, #5
Copyright © 1999
by John T Price
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