No one knows when the baby crawled back to the door and started putting footwear in his mouth again. He’s teething, someone said, they have an urge to do that. A girl ran to inform the mother, who came rushing, stop, she said, I’ve said before, stop. The baby cried, thick tears in his round, black eyes, his hand stretching to pick up the upturned slipper, a trail of saliva running from the edge of his mouth smelling like rubber.

The mother with the baby in her arms, went back to the pooja, alongside her husband who was oblivious to what the baby had been doing, absorbed in the ritual of the priest reciting the shlokas for their housewarming. It was their first home in America. The crowd of relatives and friends had been pouring in for the blessings from the prayers and to see their new house but more so to eat the refreshments catered from a well-known Indian restaurant in the neighborhood.

In the mother’s lap, the baby got restless, and the husband said, let him do whatever he wants, with a familiar irritation and the wife said, he’s chewing slippers, and he needs to be here with us. The husband raised his eyebrows as if he didn’t believe her. The wife, upset over his disregard and tired after cleaning the house single-handedly for the pooja and with not much sleep for the past few nights, let the baby down but kept an eye on him until the priest instructed her to close her eyes and chant the verses. The baby watched his mother for a moment, then smiled and crawled toward the entrance, his eyes gleaming at all the shoes and sandals, pumps and slip-ons heaped on one side. He picked up one and licked the places it has been, the foot it housed, then another and dropped it, ran his hands over small, medium and big footwear, some with a loop for the big toe, some swollen, misshaped because of the blood pooling in the feet inside them, some like stiff-jelly after standing, walking for too long in them, one lopsided due to uneven distribution of weight after an accident. Excited at so many choices, the baby cooed before he picked up a women’s shoe, inspected its contours before tasting the salt of the dust, the patches of dirt, flower seeds and a squashed bug, a moth wing glued to the heel. He continued until someone yelled, the baby is licking a shoe, and he dropped it like he touched an electric fence and started crying so loud the husband shook his wife’s shoulder to get up and take care of the baby, but she didn’t move as the women whispered about their makeup and clothes and the men sighed talking about politics and sports. Some folks chewed on the samosas and sipped chai, the baby hiccupped in a man’s arms and someone’s phone went off in their purse or pocket, a ringtone that reminded the wife of her father’s whistling whenever he was happy but that was rare—often his mouth was twisted into a sneer or a frown, the corners of his lips dropped in disappointment at her mother no matter her solid presence and endless devotion to him and their children. And through all the commotion and thoughts, the baby perhaps, back at the door sucking on the shoes hungrily, she sat quietly with her eyes closed, her husband’s voice fading into the background, in front of the gods her mother gave when she left India to protect them all from whatever that may go wrong and now there was nothing more to be done.

Tara Isabel Zambrano is a South Asian writer and the author of a full-length flash collection, Death, Desire, And Other Destinations from OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, Tin House Online, Denver Quarterly and other notable venues. She lives in Texas and can be found online on Twitter as @tara_zambrano or on Instagram as @tizambrano. Preorder her upcoming short-story collection, Ruined A Little When We Are Born, from DZANC books here.