Karl Von Helmholtz 1947

On a napkin in a coffee shop the harridan wrote down her birthrate. She meant to write down her birth-date, but at the last moment forgot when she was born. She forgot how she was born and why she was born, where she was born and how long it took for her to be born. She had a faint fleeting memory of being born, the smell of hospital disinfectant and her mother’s bath-salts, the doctor’s hands wrapped round her tiny wee tiny hips, and the sound of feet shuffling and paper crumpling. She remembered a warm splash of colour, hushed voices, a dog yowling and the smell of her mother’s bath-salts. She meant to write it all down, the moment of her birth, the faint fleeting memory of being born, the smell of hospital disinfectant, the sound of feet shuffling, a warm splash of colour, hushed voices, a dog yowling and the smell of her mother’s bath-salts, but didn’t have a napkin, something to write it down on. She wrote down other people’s birth-dates on a racing-stub she found underneath a table at the coffee-shop. Mrs. Belzoni 1948, Karl Von Helmholtz 1947, Mrs. Caldwell 1923, Jackson L. Jackson 1897, Alma Dejesus 1908, Mrs. & Mr. Anton LaSalle 1918 and 17 respectively, Mr. Crumbly (who’s name was pronounced Crambly) 1928, and so on until the pen she was using ran dry of ink. Of all these people she knew but one, Alma Dejesus, who she met at the second church bazaar, Madame Dejesus being the mother of Dejesus, whom she knew from the first church bazaar, the one her sister had a table at.