Jeannie

The Talisman

Anita pushed her cart over the checkered hospital floor with a rhythmic, labored gait. She limped slightly thanks to her left knee, and the cart she had tonight did too. "Nothing works perfectly," she used to tell her children. Tonight she whispered this to the hospital's children as the automatic door shut too quickly, catching the edge of her cart and piercing the tranquility of the NICU at night.

###"Shhh, back to sleep," she whispered to Zachariah, the closest infant, though he was motionless and deaf to the world in his isolette. "May the Almighty make you strong."

###From the pouch of her uniform, she took out the aged, white-faced doll, the one she would no longer enter this place without, and blessed him. She'd made the doll from scraps, many years ago for Sonia, the kitten-sized infant who had been pale and wheezing desperately into the tubes that smothered her pinched face. Sweet Sonia, who could've been a child of the old country. Anita gave the talisman a ghostly-white face, to drain the death from this child. She'd touched it to Sonia's forehead each night.

###The doll seemed to work. As the nights ticked away, Sonia's breaths grew slower and calmer and her color no longer matched the white of the doll. One night the cart was empty, save a few crumpled white blankets still warm from the embrace of young life.

###Since then Anita used the doll to bless every infant as she scrubbed her way through the NICU, unless of course parents or nurses were nearby. The nurses were suspicious of dirty things. The parents seemed like blessing enough, most of the time.

###The weakest of all the infants right now was Chelsea, whose young parents had been weeping at her side nearly every night. Anita clutched the doll in her apron each time she rolled past with the cart, hoping some of the good luck might catch on from afar. Tonight her mother lay slumped in a chair, relieved from tortured consciousness. Anita left her cart many steps away, cursing the pain in her knee and the noise of her imperfect body. Chelsea's forehead was open for blessings. Anita had the doll firm in her grasp, readied for its curing powers, when heavy footsteps shook the floor. She backed away just as a team of doctors charged through.
###

"Her heart rate's dropping," one of them bellowed.
###
"There's not much we can do." Another threw up his hands.

###The young mother stirred and sobbed.###

Anita held the doll up behind them, but none seemed to notice her. The doctor held a piece of paper up for the mother, who wouldn't look at it but only buried her face in her hands, knowing that a piece of paper couldn't help.

###"I help, I help," Anita heard her own voice say, coming so much slower than her thoughts. She'd never quite mastered the language. She held the doll to the child's face and was just beginning to say a special prayer when the doctor smacked it away.

###"Get out of here!" The doctors shouted, and Anita was escorted through the heavy, imperfect door for the very last time.