Extraits

When I was a girl, it snowed for a whole summer.

Every day, the sun rose smudgy behind a smoke-gray sky and hovered behind its haze; in the evenings, it sank, orange and defeated, like the glowing embers of a dying flame.

And the flakes came down and down—not cold to touch, but with their own peculiar burn—as the wind brought smells of burning.

Every night, my mother and father sat us down to watch the news. All the pictures were the same: towns neatly evacuated, cities enclosed, grateful citizens waving from the windows of big, shiny buses as they were carted off to a new future, a life of perfect happiness. A life of painlessness.

“See?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?”

And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.

I think of Conrad's hands, Rachel's dark hair, Lena's rosebud mouth, how when she was an infant, I used to sneak into her bedroom and hold her while she slept.

Rachel never let me- From her birth, she screamed, kicked, would have woken the household and the street.

But Lena lay still and warm in my arms, submerged in some secret dreamland. And she was my secret: those nighttime hours, that twin heartbeat space, the darkness, the joy.

All of this, I write.

And so truth shall set me free.