Discovery of Newborn Girl on the Greenway, Newham, London | Leah Mullen
Discovery by a dog walker at 9.13 pm on Thursday, 18 January
junction of Greenway and High Street South in East Ham
child was taken to hospital, without any injuries
police are appealing
to find the baby’s mother.
The baby could’ve been laboured out of a Dickens novel, born as she was and left like an unexploded bomb on the pathside. The caul fell foul of the 10p plastic bag charge. She mewled against it, spiking her newborn panic in the stubby grass. The mother was gone.
The mother was trafficked in an anonymous hospital ward. The mother was fearing for her life, handcuffed in a cell, in a basement, in a cubicle on a boat. The mother was sent overseas for daring to come overseas. The mother was anonymously dead or drunk and loving it.
Wise Men? Too late in the season. Too far north for storks. Fortunately for this scrap of prey, too built-up for hawks to be buzzing the wasted verges. In the spring, hollers of sparrows murmured up from the long weeds there, surprising out of poppies and thistle along paths thick with joggers and crabapples. But January sprung almost sudden in the city with its grey promises: a season of steel wool, eczema, grass just stripes of prickle.
But the baby, for now just a collection of kicks in striped plastic, just a collection of scents, of blood, of milk, of meat to a wet and searching lurcher nose in the stubby grass, just a collection of slightly less grey promises: the baby
was found.
About the Author:
Leah Mullen is a New Jersey native who’s been living in the UK since 2003. She is a secondary school English teacher and advocate for the arts and humanities subjects. You can find her work in Five on the Fifth, Molotov Cocktail, Impspired, Literally Stories, and Mosspuppy . She has been shortlisted for several flash fiction awards, including the Bridport Prize.