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I’m in her lap, on the big bed with the velvet green bedspread and velvet green cushions. Surrounded by softness–the pillows on the bed, the pillow of her chest. So cushy and comfy. I press and push with my tiny hands, and am startled when she cries out, “Ouch! That hurts!”

How can it hurt when it’s so soft?

This is the first time it occurs to me that what feels soft and cushy and good to me, might not feel the same way for her. That my pleasure can be her pain. It is epochal, this epiphany.

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How often I’ve played judge and jury in my own trials, and the case was always fixed!

You’re not a writer!

You’re not an artist!

You can’t sing!

Guilty guilty guilty!

Off with her head!

I submitted meekly, allowed myself to be imprisoned with nary a complaint.

Yet where was the evidence?

“Other people draw better.”

“I can’t write like Nabokov.”

“I’m not Sinatra.”

The sentence for these crimes: quit!

Clearly I needed a better defense attorney!

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The wax is warm as I press my hand into it. Warm and soft, sensual, forgiving.

Miss A tells me to hold my hand still, so I do, waiting patiently, a good girl.

When she says I can remove my hand, I pull it from the wax, cooler now, harder.

Then I skip off to the sandbox, or maybe the easels with their dull, powdery poster paints. Am I there when they pour the plaster? I don’t remember.

But a few days later I come home with a plaster casting of my hand print, which hangs in my parents’ bedroom for years.

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