48 The Meadow hard. “Go on. Learn some grace. If you can.” She pushes again. I back out of the house, not convinced I won’t get a bullet in the back. The air is different outside. The moon is almost full above me. I feel I’ve just survived an earthquake. I think of my mother’s hair, with sun shining through it. That song a melancholy vibration in her throat. The little ridge of trees ahead. They are a destination, those trees, and I want to reach them, holding my butterfly net, her song in my ears. My requiem comes up through me all at once, and I hum it out loud at the moon. It was always my mother’s song. But it’s different this time. The music is now an elegy to everything that’s lost. It is my lost life that I mourn.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQ3NA==