TE23 Double Feature

The President Shop

Vesna Mari ć

curled like a wreath. The red star crowned her like an aura, a celectial body around the new-born, delivered from the heavens. Rosa was swollen and red and the many globes of her body—the belly a vast sun behind which nestled the aureole of the breasts—radiated like circu-lar echoes. Tears ran down Rosa’s face. She looked down at the baby and smiled with her beautiful mouth. The umbilical cord pulsated between them. Thereafter, whenever they saw the doctor in the street Rosa would say to Mona “This is the man who birthed you,” as if only the doctor had been the one to do the work of labor. The doctor always smelled of alcohol and cigarettes, and glimmered with sweat, like a silver birch in the wind.

youth. Later, when Mona was nearing the first decade of her life, firm on her legs and lean in her body, the pictures of the President were in color, his aged countenance now full, sporting dark sunglasses, liver spots, and a military cap. Often, in his autumn years, a Cuban cigar poked stiffly from between his canines. The doctor rushed in, perspiring and smelling of cigarettes and alcohol. He had been drinking and smoking in a bar moments before being summoned by the panicked Diogen, Ruben’s younger brother, who had been helping Rosa in the shop Rosa’s waters broke across the floor like in the movie, propel-ing her into the fastest labor known to womankind, as if Mona insisted she be born right there in the President Shop. The doctor, Gypsy songs stil pounding in his head, arrived at the shop and found Rosa stretched out across the floor on the top of the national flag, the five-pointed star beneath her. The baby was delivered upon it,

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