Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee Page B

against nature. That is my belief.
    “Where did you get your white plates with the orange borders?” I asked the old man as he was drying them. He used to dry every dish separately. Forks, spoons, everything. He was fastidious about his dish drying.
    “Scavenging night,” he said.
    The old man was a wonderful scavenger. I sometimes accompanied him on scavenging expeditions. He had a sixth sense.
    “You’ve got to have the eye,” he said.
    I don’t have the eye yet, but I’m trying. I’m training my eyes to be like the old man. It’s difficult for two reasons: (a) I know how to read and he didn’t, and (b) he saw possibility everywhere.
    When you know how to read you can never get away from it. Your eye goes to words first and everything else second. The old man was not hampered by the knowledge of letters. His eye could roam free. He could take in the big picture, whereas I am bound to words first and foremost. Now that I know this I some times try to remember being a baby, before I was trapped by words. What was it like? I ask myself. I narrow my eyes and try not to see words and printing and letters. It’s hopeless. I’m a reader.
    While he dried the dishes I asked him my death row question again.
    “I will ask you a variation of the question you never answered,” I said. “Electric chair or life in solitary confinement with worms in your meal bucket every night and only a scrap of horse blanket to sleep on: which would you choose?”
    He hung his dish towel over the oven door handle to dry. He always hung it in exactly the same way.
    “Are they my only choices?”
    “They are your only choices.”
    “I ask because there are many other ways to live and die.”
    “There are more ways to live and die, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your universe,” I said. “But you are allowed only two. Which do you choose?”
    “Which would
you
choose?”
    He used to do that sometimes, turn the tables.
    “I believe, sir, that you were the one asked the question,” I said.
    The old man finished washing and drying his dishes. No answer was forthcoming.
    “It’s scavenging night tonight,” he said. “Do you want to go looking with me?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    “Do you need anything special?”
    Yes, I thought. I need a sister. I need my Baby Girl.
    “How about cookie cutters?” I said. “Small metal objects that are useful as well as beautiful.”
    Tamar has a small cheesecloth bag of cookie cutters in our junk drawer at home. We don’t use them. We don’t make cookies. Tamar doesn’t believe in sweet things. She has a streakof asceticism in her. She would not admit to it, but she does. If they do it the way it should be done, monks and nuns are ascetics. They live alone in cells. Absolutely bare. Stripped of everything worldly, which means anything colorful, anything frivolous, anything that is not essential to the sustainment of life. If they do it right, monks and nuns go to sleep on hard cots with one blanket in a cell that has one cross hanging on the wall, preferably at the head of their narrow single bed with its one, scratchy, thin, brown, wool blanket, similar to the kind of scrap of horse blanket that the young Georg Kominsky slept with in solitary confinement.
    Our small cheesecloth bag of metal cookie cutters contains a bell, a heart, and a star. That’s it. You can’t get much more basic than that. To my knowledge, they have never been used. The most sugar the antisugar Tamar allows is a teaspoonful on her Cheerios. She’s a thin woman, Tamar. Some might call her scrawny.
    T he old man saw possibility. The old man saw potential in things that I could not. Tinfoil, for instance. A person like the person I used to be would rip off just enough tinfoil to wrap the leftover with, wrap it, and stick it in the refrigerator. But the old man made tinfoil swans out of his leftovers.
    “That’s a waste of good tinfoil,” Tamar said the one time I tried to make something pretty out of two leftover