Burial Rites

And though the snow smothered the valley and the milk froze in the dairy, my soul thawed.

My throat closed up with pain, and something else, something hard and inciting and as black as tar. I did not let myself cry.

Instead, I, I . . . I encourage her to speak of her past. Rather than address her, I allow her to speak to me. I provide her with a final audience to her life’s lonely narrative.’

My forehead aches from the tightness of my plaits, and I suddenly long to untie them, to walk about with my hair unbraided, to lie on my back in the sun.

Rósa’s poetry kindled the shavings of my soul, and lit me up from within. Natan never stopped loving her. How could he? Her poetry made lamps out of people.

‘Do I remember?’ she repeated, a little louder. ‘I wish I could forget it.’ She unhooked her index finger from the thread of wool and brought it to her forehead. ‘In here,’ she said, ‘I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book. It’s written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink.’

those hidden bruises suggested something more – an end to the stifling ordinariness of existence.

In those early visits it was as though we were building something sacred. We’d place words carefully together, piling them upon one another, leaving no spaces. We each created towers, two beacons, the like of which are built along roads to guide the way when the weather comes down. We saw one another through the fog, the suffocating repetition of l

Her body never took to the manufacture of children.