Babies
Babies smelling of camomile
tea, cologne water, wet laundry, dog soap. Babies who appear old, disillusioned
and tired of life at six months. Babies that cry «Papa!» to blushing youths of
nineteen or twenty at church picnics.
Fat babies whose earlobes turn
out at an angle of forty-five degrees. Soft babies asleep in perambulators, the
sun shining straight into their faces. Babies gnawing the tails of synthetic
dogs. Babies without necks. Pale, scorbutic babies of the third and fourth
generation, damned because their grandfathers and great-grandfathers read Tom
Paine.
Babies of a bluish tinge, or
with vermilion eyes. Babies full of soporifics. Thin, cartilaginous babies that
stretch when they are lifted. Warm, damp, miasmatic babies. Affectionate,
ingratiating, gurgling babies: the larvae of life insurance solicitors,
fashionable doctors, episcopal rectors, dealers in Mexican mine stock,
handshakers, Sunday-school superintendents. Hungry babies, absurdly sucking
their thumbs. Babies with heads of thick coarse black hair, seeming to be
toupees.
Unbaptised babies, dedicated
to the devil. Eugenic babies. Babies that crawl out from under tables and are
stepped on. Babies with lintels, grains of corn or shoe-buttons up their noses,
purple in the face and waiting for the doctor or the embalmer. A few pink,
blue-eyed, tight-skinned, clean-looking babies, smiling upon the world..
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