|
Bridget Daly
Intro: Dear Delphine
Just one figure on the Rue d’Enfer moves against the flow, oblivious to everything around her. It is a young woman, her face shaded by a grey bonnet, carrying a small bundle under her cloak. She stops in front of the entrance to an austere, imposing building, L’Hospice des Enfants Trouvés – The Hospital for Foundlings. It rises up in front of her, windows grilled, the massive oaken door shut and barred. To the right of the door is a long bell-rope and next to it a wooden box protruding from an opening in the wall. Its sides are deep, to stop its fragile cargo from falling out. A pull on the bell rope causes the box to rotate into the building.
With a shuddering sigh the woman pulls back her cloak and brings out a small basket lined with linen, the swaddled infant inside wrapped in a neatly embroidered coverlet. She places the basket into the wooden box, and pins a piece of paper to the swaddling, whispering the words as she has so often done since she composed them: ‘I have been baptised. My name is Delphine. Please care for me. I have been torn from my mother’s heart.’
Bridget Daly is a museum tour guide living in London. She usually writes Flash Fiction which has been published in various literary mags and sites including Free Flash Fiction, Paragraph Planet, Maudlin House, the Ekphrastic Review and others. This is an extract from an unpublished novel called Dear Delphine.
|
