The White Crossing

The white paint goes down with a soft, floury hiss.

Merrin walks backward, guiding the wheeled marker across Bell Street while the town holds its breath around him. The shops are shuttered for the noon heat. A delivery bicycle leans against the chemist’s window. Somewhere behind the houses, a woman beats a rug, each blow arriving gently through the warm air.

The new crossing lies outside the maternity home. Merrin has already painted the first broad stripe. He turns the marker, sights along the chalk line, and begins the next.

Halfway across, a footprint appears in the wet paint.

He stops pushing.

It is a small print, perhaps a child’s, with a round heel and five clear toe marks. The paint around it is unbroken. No child stands nearby. No child could have reached the stripe without leaving a mark in the dust on either side.

Merrin sets the brake on the marker. The fresh paint smells of linseed and hot stone.

Another print forms beside the first.

This one wears a school shoe. The sole has a little crescent missing at the toe, as if someone cut it with a blunt knife. Then comes a larger shoe, narrow and heeled. Then the tread of a work boot. Each impression appears without sound, pressing down into the whiteness and lifting from it, though nothing can be seen above.

They lead from the maternity home toward the far pavement.

Merrin steps closer. The prints grow older as they cross. The work boot gives way to a polished shoe with a worn outer edge, then to a slipper, then to the bare impression of a foot so thin that the bones show through the skin.

At the curb, the trail ends.

The front door of the maternity home opens. A nurse comes out carrying a folded blanket, followed by a young woman with a sleeping baby against her shoulder. The mother shades her eyes and regards the wet crossing.

“Can we pass?” she asks.

Merrin means to tell her no. Instead, he looks at the infant’s dangling foot, pink and loose with sleep.

The second toe is shorter than the first. So is the second toe in the final, ancient footprint by the curb.

“Along the edge,” he says. “Mind the paint.”

The mother steps into the road.

Where her shoe touches the first stripe, the paint receives the mark of a bare child’s foot.

She does not notice. On the next stripe, her print is smaller still, the soft oval of an infant’s heel. At the middle of the road, there is no footprint beneath her at all.

Merrin feels the hair rise along his arms.

On the farther stripes, her steps return, but in reverse: a girl’s buttoned shoe, a young woman’s sandal, the sensible heel she is wearing now. By the time she reaches the opposite curb, her own tread lies neat and ordinary behind her.

The baby leaves no marks in the paint.

Not yet.

The mother thanks him and walks on beneath the plane trees. The infant wakes as they pass into shade and opens one dark, untroubled eye.

Merrin looks again at the first trail, the whole life laid across the street in quiet steps. The smallest print is nearest the door. The oldest rests at the far side, pointing outward.

Then the bare toes curl.

The wet paint gathers in their hollows. Slowly, carefully, the final footprint turns, as though whoever made it has paused at the curb and is considering the way back.