Brown Paint

Grace and Fadima are painting again ... the morgue is cold enough to keep the bodies and warm enough to keep the women ... They have been doing this since March ... the small faces that arrive without names and leave without names and the mothers who come on Tuesdays to look ...

R43.20 for the brown ... including VAT ... The brown is not the right brown ... it is too warm for what happened to these children ... too alive for what the children are now ... Grace mixes in a little of the blue that was meant for the walls ... Fadima says nothing ... They have stopped correcting each other ...

Children's paint ... the cheap kind ... the kind that washes off hands and out of uniforms and off tables ... The kind that was never meant to last ... They use it because it is what the mothers recognize ... the mothers see the paint and remember fingers and paper and the afternoon before ...

Fadima's hands shake on the smaller faces ... her hands are steady on the larger ones ... Grace's hands are the opposite ... They have not discussed this ... it does not need discussing ... The body knows what the body knows ...

Grace started this ... brought the paint in a plastic bag on a morning when three children arrived at once and the documentation forms asked for distinguishing features and the answer was none ... all three had the same face ... the face of a child who stopped being a child before being a child was finished ...

The paint does not make them recognizable ... it makes them someone's ... The blue mixed into the brown is Grace's addition ... the thing she does not tell anyone ... the small rebellion of color against what color has become in this room ...

Tuesday is the day the mothers come ... they walk slowly down the corridor ... they look through the glass ... some of them touch the glass ... Grace and Fadima are on the other side ... painting ...

R43.20 ... including VAT ...