André Babyn

The old woman has eighteen children she doesn’t know what to do with. All of the children are forced to live in milk crates that she keeps on a shelf in her cramped apartment. On the weekends she takes the crates down and shuttles them to her booth at the farmer’s market, where the children do tricks for coins. 

The smallest of the children, Sarah, is always pressed upon by her older siblings. Often she is overwhelmed by their looming voices, scabby knees, oozing armpits. In the morning she may wake up with one, or several, ripped gym socks, black toes peeking through, pecking over the entrance to her milk crate, a nail digging rudely into one cheek. Sarah keeps all of her members carefully, and never lets an arm or leg slip out over the edge of her crate, because if she were to press herself into the others’s cramped living space punishment would quickly follow, correction in the form of a rude whining, baritone bark, or silent kick or dig into her nostril. 

Her trick is she draws large, slow, periods, ingraining them circuitously with pen in a loose spiral notebook. It’s not much of a trick . Her siblings juggle balls off the tips of their noses, or twirl stacks of hoops on their elbows, knees, and necks, as well as perform other athletic novelties. During the performances the jeers directed at Sarah from her siblings are endless. Though her siblings, and Sarah herself, believe the insults are genuine, they are a deliberate strategy employed by the old woman. The only coins Sarah earns are from those assembled who think her slow, and pity her. 

Sarah came upon her period trick by accident. As she grew her periods took longer and longer to finish. Sentences separated by deserts, the silence of a pen rounding endlessly in shiny black whorled depressions. 

“Maybe if I don’t finish this period,” Sarah found herself thinking, “I’ll find myself in the silence that is the period’s nature.”