The Mural – creative nonfiction by Marylou Fusco

The Mural

During my seventh month of pregnancy of my forty-second year I would walk three laps around the park by my house. My big city neighborhood was more like a small town and so I became a familiar sight. I was the pregnant woman in black sweats walking in the late afternoon light. Neighbors would wave and I would wave back. Truthfully, I was only half in my body, barely aware of the chill or leaves crunching around my feet. As I marked each lap done, done, and done the knot in my chest would loosen. Back-to-back miscarriages had shaken me so badly that I created a whole series of rituals to protect this child. Three laps around the park every afternoon was a part of that. Other rituals included: Acupuncturist appointments where I dozed in a chair with needles piercing my forehead and feet. Ditching my vegetarian diet for meals of venison marinated in red wine and fresh garlic in the hope that meat would strengthen my blood. Visiting the national shrine of St. Rita of Cascia, patron saint of Impossible Cases once, sometimes twice a week where my scribbled prayer requests all said the same thing—A healthy child born.  

            Rituals are typically used to mark the holy passage of time or to lead us to a place of greater awareness. Mine were born out of grief and a desire for control. Still, they worked. The acupuncture needles unblocked what was blocked, the venison strengthened my blood, the patron saint of Impossible Cases heard my pleas and my daughter arrived on the feast of the Epiphany. 

            As my daughter grew she developed her own rituals. There were bedtime rituals involving the arrangement of dolls and mealtime rituals involving favorite plates and cups. These days her rituals center around her swim lessons.  She likes the idea of swimming but likes the feel of solid ground beneath her feet more. I watch as she lays her towel just so, adjusts her swim goggles just so. She knows instinctively that to touch and arrange the items connected to the water will impart at least a measure of courage and calm once she is in the water. 

             Still, in the pool she refuses to float, arching and squirming so that her head doesn’t touch the water. Theinstructor is patient and wins her over bit by bit. Each week I watch my daughter relax more and more into the instructor’s arms trusting they would hold her.

            “Kick, kick!”  the instructor shouts and the children all kick, kick, doing their best to stay afloat.

            At the height of the pandemic, my daughter and I would go for a walk to see the mosaic mural a few blocks from our house. Nearly everything was shut down and so a walk outside had become a treat almost as good as ice cream on a hot day. “Let’s look for something on our walk we haven’t seen before,”  I would say to her before we left the house.  Not so easy for me as motherhood has taught me to to take in the bigger picture, to turn my full attention towards potential predators. I’m less attuned to the smaller changes around me. My daughter fills in those blanks although looking from a distance is usually not enough for her. She likes to get up close. She wants to touch.

            Once the contents of a convince store medical kit scattered along the curb.  Antiseptic swabs, wipes, bandages in all sizes and shapes.

            Once a bag full of colorful, crumpled stickers propped up against a tree pit. 

            Once a small dead bird in the middle of the sidewalk. No visible signs of illness or injury.

            While the bandages and bag of stickers disappeared almost overnight, the dead bird remained on the sidewalk for a surprisingly long time. Sometimes my daughter forgot about the bird and I was glad. Other times I would think we had safely passed when she would say, oh! the bird! and we circled back where I did my best to answer her questions about decay and the possibility of resurrection.

            Once a line of ants swarmed over the bird to carry away its flesh. We watched their busy work for a long time and no explanation was necessary. 

            The mural itself was installed before my family moved here. It was meant to celebrate the nearby elementary school as we all as acknowledge a neighborhood grappling with gentrification. It is a riot of colored stones, tiles, and shards of glass that capture and reflect the light. There is a blazing sun, a tire swing, a rainbow. In the center are two hands reaching towards each other as if to say: We have arrived. We are BELOVED COMMUNITY.  Several years have passed since its installation and the mural has fallen on hard times. Many of the stones and tiles have fallen away. The reaching hands are badly chipped. 

            I like the mural’s deterioration. I like how time and the elements have left their mark as if it were a living person. We visited the mural through all four seasons now. Some of those seasons had dramatic moments like when the cherry blossoms drenched the cars and sidewalks around us, and we scooped up the paper-thin petals in hands. Or the time we outran a hailstorm to return home breathless and delighted. We were that strong, that fast.

            Each time we stand before the mural we are different too, if only on some cellular level. I am reminded of those nights when my daughter woke up crying saying her bones hurt. How I sat beside her and rubbed a sweet-smelling, mostly useless lotion onto her shins and forearms. I remembered the mornings when she marched into the kitchen to proclaim, ‘I feel taller’ and I noticed her wrists and ankles poking out of her pyjamas and thought, Of course. How could I have missed it?  She has been growing in the dark.

            After I suffered a rare heart attack at forty-six, my ritual was to sit in the hospital cafeteria overlooking a courtyard twice a week with a container of yogurt waiting for my cardiac rehab session to begin. At cardiac rehab I walked at a moderate to brisk pace on a treadmill with electrodes attached to my chest. Courtyard, yogurt, treadmill. The weeks and months after a heart attacks are strange and filled with silent “what-ifs?”  Peace is elusive. After several months my care team praised my progress and sent me back into the world with few restrictions. I walked, swam, laughed, ran. People were shocked, horrified when I told them what had happened to me. Pretty soon it became a story I stopped telling. 

            The national shrine of Saint Rita of Cascia where I went to offer my prayer requests for my then unborn child is a popular sport for modern pilgrims. People arrive via tour busses and are drawn to the lower shrine where they are greeted by a statue of the saint surrounded by candles and red roses. Her pose is one of welcome although her expression is sad, almost pained as if she is already familiar with our most private griefs. Saint Rita of Cascia’s remains are in Italy, but one of her brown habits is on display in this shrine. We were only allowed to look as I imagined fabric so fragile it would disintegrate under the slightest touch. 

            After writing my prayer request,  I often visited the gift shop looking for an item to mark my visit. I longed for something I could wear against my skin, some scaled-down version of a nun’s habit. After my heart attack my best friend sent me a bracelet of green Aventurine crystals that were believed to hold heart healing properties. I wore that bracelet everywhere, even to bed although the crystals left painful indents on my wrist every morning. The arteries that had torn deep within my chest were invisible to the naked eye, their healing an uncertain process.  The bracelet became a tangible symbol of both my wound and my healing. One day my daughter stretched the elastic of the bracelet so much that it snapped and the crystals scattered across the floor. I sent her to her room and then cried.

            These days we don’t visit the mural anymore. The pandemic has ended leaving our family mostly untouched. We have entered into a different rhythm of school and activities. We pass the mural in passing, and it is something of an accident or what my pastor calls grace that I now recognize it as a sort of shrine—not one attended by statues and roses but one abandoned to time and the elements. Our nightly walks required a necessary sense of wonder and the belief that dragons might appear alongside angels. We wore sturdy shoes and jackets with deep pockets for whatever treasure we collected along the way. My daughter often insisted on bringing dolls so worn from her small child love that I almost felt sorry for them and the witness they were meant to bear. Even the ants swarming over the dead bird were doing holy work although we did not realize it at the time. And the bird lives because the ants do. When we reached the mural, we stood back to consider the mural as a whole then got up close to examine the details we’ve overlooked. The glossy pink flower hiding in one corner. A kite with its tail twisting across the entire length of the mural. We ran our fingers over the chips and gouges, not to mourn what was lost, but to better feel the broken parts that remain.

Marylou Fusco‘s writing has appeared in Carve, Swink, Five on the Fifth, and Mutha magazine. Her short stories have won the Philadelphia City Paper and literary journal, So to Speak fiction contests. Past jobs have included general assignment reporter, GED instructor, and ghost tour guide. She lives with her family in Baltimore where she is finishing a novel about reluctant saints and resurrections.