Lost Baby in the Museum

She walked in little steps, now she had learned to walk, across a tiled foyer towards the first room in the museum.

Siobhan and I had been there before, in fact I had been multiple times, but hopefully we’d find something new to look at. The last rooms had the Egyptian corridor which was always interesting for something.

It was funny to think we’d had a third baby.

I must must tell Kamila, I thought.

We arrived at the appointed hour and a woman stood at two heavy polished wood doors in the foyer and punched our tickets. Then we pushed open one of those doors so that we could pass through.

The first room was huge with thick maroon curtains hanging from the walls. The floor tiles were black polished square stones, and at the far end was a large bed with a fluffy cover to lie on.

I steered the baby in that direction and Siobhan and I jumped onto the bed and lay diagonally across it.

The bed glooped.

“I thought it was going to be a water bed,” I said. “It must be from the 70s, before they figured to put baffles in.”

Siobhan lay on her front and I was on my back and the waves of the water inside made my stomach want to turn.

“I have to get off,” I said, and we got off together.

“We should get a brochure, otherwise we don’t know what we are looking at.”

“It’s supposed to be experiential,” Siobhan replied.

“It’s ridiculous,” I complained.

We resolved to get a pamphlet or instructions.

“Two minutes,” the woman with the punch told us as she let back out into the foyer. “After that I can’t let you back in.”

I steered the baby towards the gift shop, and we asked a man at the kiosk for a brochure.

The kiosk was situated one step up from the floor so he was looking down at me when I asked him.

“Nothing like that,” he said as he showed me a coloring book for children.

So we asked him to look after the baby and went into the next room along.

The new room looked like a lecture hall, a dark yellow room with rows of seats sloped up in front of us, but when we asked the man at the lectern, he shook his head and we turned back towards the gift shop.

By the time we returned the baby had already disappeared.

“She must be somewhere around,” I said and we hurried through the foyer, past the woman with the punch, and back into the first exhibition room.

There the baby was, at the far end of the room, in a corner next to the bed.

“Oh no!” I exclaimed as I saw her toddle towards us.

Someone had put a plaster over her right eye.

I knelt down to look. There was a blister there, where I unpeeled the plaster, and below her bottom eyelid there was a bloody hole, the diameter of a pencil.

“It’ll be alright,” I said to Siobhan and the woman who’d put on the plaster said, “She just bumped herself.”

With the back of her pudgy hand the baby scraped her eye, across the hole.

“Don’t do that,” I soothed. “It will be alright.”

Then I turned to ask Siobhan, “Where to next?”

Photo by Abd Elhamid Zaki via Pexels.