Assignment: The silence that contains a world.

She lifted his frozen arm and the world stopped. The senile grandmother hushed her made-up stories of how he had dropped dead from muskrats two weeks after Philadelphia. The father loosened his grip on the bowling ring and quit arguing with the sister whether to slip it off his finger or bury it with him. The mother put her hand in the mouth of the little brother who had been muttering into the casket, "it's not scary...it's PopPop...it's not scary...it's just PopPop..."

The doll's arm hung in the middle of the frozen world, not so much cold as hard, with fingernails painted almost life-like over the white quilt. The skin on the back of the hand was smooth as wax, shiny, like the cloth from a pair of khaki workpants worn thin in the seat of a john deere tractor or buick regal and dotted with engine grease and garden dirt. Brown hand that bowled a golden game in the state colored league. Brown hand made white in a wisp of a mormon prayer. Brown-spotted hand cupped as if holding a dish of ice cream or a little girl's butt. Someone had scrubbed the hand and nails, perhaps even trimmed the cuticles. (A child's doll must be absolutely clean. Who knows what she might put in her mouth?)

Still, if she were really quiet she could almost hear those fingernails growing.

ãElizabeth Terry
11/19/96