Little Plum by Laura McPhee-Browne

Author:Laura McPhee-Browne [Laura McPhee-Browne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2022-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

That night in bed, Coral doesn’t try to speak to her stomach. She will give in now, and take the help from the hospital, she decides, staring at the cracks on the ceiling and counting them, because she needs to stay safe. Maybe the social worker will be able to help her with the anguished feeling she has had in her body for so long, the feeling that is getting harder to ignore. She wants to hope for this, but she doesn’t know what to pin the hope on.

She reads a few poems from a collection she bought in Gdańsk, at a bookshop near their hotel. When she had asked the owner to recommend a Polish poet, he had insisted she buy a collection by Wisława Szymborska, ‘darling of our Polska’, and she was happy to oblige. The verse is translated, of course, and is clear and beautiful, laden with uncomplicated metaphor, and just what Coral needs. She keeps coming back to a poem called ‘In Praise of Dreams’, and the lines from it that echo in her head: A few years ago / I saw two suns. It helps her pretend, momentarily, that anything is possible.

Sleep comes easily: she is so tired. She dreams she is picking flowers in a field of purple. She has an infant strapped tightly to her chest, like a barnacle, and a taste in her mouth that she tries to swallow down. The baby is a penguin, the baby is a penguin, the baby has a face as blistered as the sun.

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