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Author: Thekla Jackiv
last update Last Updated: 2025-08-31 00:19:18

The ruin around us breathed mildew and salty tears, but when I closed my eyes it smelled like bergamot and laundry starch. Memory is a lousy film noir; it keeps adding bay windows to rooms you only used once. I leaned against the well-lived desk. My mother just told me I was just a medical experiment with nice legs, and the desk’s wood grain turned into the kitchen table from another country, another decade. I remembered sun playing on glass. Lace curtains trying to teach the breeze how to behave. My mother was called Anastasia then. It wasn’t a codename yet, nor a cautionary tale. She was brewing Jasmine tea in our kitchen like it could fix all troubles in my little world.

She used to cool the cup with two spoons of honey. “Sip, little dumpling,” she’d murmur, and my name in her mouth made me feel invincible. The tea was honey-sweet, with a bitterness that only arrived after the second spoon. I thought that was what love tasted like—warm up front, bitter sweet in the afterthought. Ye
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  • The Vision She Hid   133

    Nicos spread the shipping logs across his knees like a map he’d spent a lifetime learning to hate. The laptop’s flat glow bathed us in a pallid honesty—tired but unflinching. He scrolled and tapped as though each keystroke were a punch in the gut. Dates piled up like nasty debts, ports repeated as if echoing our forgotten sins, and flags on the screen promised lies wrapped up in neat corporate lawsuits.“Here,” he said, his voice as clipped as a bank teller’s, and the line on the screen offered a poetic name: NOVAZENE LLC. Wilmington, Delaware. Just another subsidiary of a subsidiary stashed away in a trust with a name that sounded like a Florida golf club. The same wire routes that fed those shabby clinic shells, the same batch code—Δ-12—and the notes column, ever cryptic, declared odd “biological consumables.” A message as cold and final as a price on one’s ruined life.“Uh-huh. It’s Lucia’s paper trail,” I said, letting the words hang in the stale air.“She likes American mannerism

  • The Vision She Hid   132

    Our helicopter climbed until the town went flat and the Sicilian lemon groves turned into dark plates with neat black seams. The pilot killed the lights and held the nose steady. Nobody was in a mood for idle chat. We had the thump of the blades, the hiss of air through the vents, and the thin metal whine that files at your teeth. The oldish wireless printer sat bolted under the console with a separate battery pack, like somebody’s bad joke about office work on the run. I though it was rather handy joke. I thumbed through the settings until it coughed itself awake. It hesitated, thought it over, then spat pages into my hand! Gianni’s ledgers, neat stack of them, slid into my plastic sleeve like fish in the net. The paper smelled of disinfectant and burned coffee. Ink had bled on the first sheet and then made up its mind to be professional. The numbers looked odd. They’ve ran in Anatole’s tight, crabbed style. He wrote things as if someone was watching and he didn’t plan to make it ea

  • The Vision She Hid   131

    The helicopter came in low over the roofs and shook flour off the bakery like dust from an old rug. The rotor wash turned the square into a wind tunnel and gave everyone a free bad hair day. People ran to their doors because that’s what people do when a machine drops from the sky on their town. Dogs barked because nobody was there to tell them off.We stood in the alley by the basil cans and waited for the noise to become something we could work with. Celeste kept one hand in her pocket and the other on the old stone wall. Maria shielded her eyes with a flat hand. Andrew looked like a man counting his unpaid debts. Elky was there, but only just. I tasted jet fuel and lemons and thought the mixer is vile.The pilot settled in the schoolyard at the edge of the square. The school had a roof with a gap where a tile should. When the rotors slowed down, a man in a black suit jumped down and unlatched the side door like he did so every weekend. He didn’t care to look at us. He looked at the

  • The Vision She Hid   130

    My humble abode above the bakery kept the day’s heat like a jar with an air-tight lid. The fan moved air from one corner to another and called it cooling work. I pulled the curtains half-closed and set the night-vision camera on the sill covered in dead flies. The glass was streaked with flour dust. I wiped a patch with the heel of my palm and left a clear oval and a smear across my hand. It smelled faintly of yeast and felt good. Well, definitely better than rotten fish at the docks.The hill house sat across my window, a black shape cut out of the darker sky. A line of trees marked the lemon grove. The wall ran under them, old stone and newer unsighty patch, the kind of repair you get when money shows up late.In the square below me, the last voices faded. Chairs scraped the pavement. A scooter coughed and went quietly away. The bakery clinked and hissed under my feet, then settled to a slow breathing—trays in, trays out, oven door, TV chatter. The old woman sang a bar in the wrong

  • The Vision She Hid   129

    The engine came up the hill and died out like a cough that didn’t want doctor’s attention. The sound bounced off the church wall and slipped into the water. The docks went back to being docks—tar, rope, diesel, and dead fish. Nets lay in heaps like tired laundry. A gull stood on a bollard and watched us without much respect.Maria pulled her jean jacket tighter. “That’s the second truck I’ve heard doing that,” she said. “Up, down, stop. Like a metronome.”“Yeah. They have bad rhythm,” Andrew said. He had his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up. He looked like a man trying to be part of a wall.I watched the hill. A thin line of lights ran along the ridge like a dotted sentence. It didn’t say much. The air was heavy, damp, and still warm. I kept feeling salt on my lips. A ferry horn moaned somewhere out in the dark and a smaller boat answered.“We don’t follow engines,” I said. “Engines don’t love us back.”“So what do we follow?” Maria asked.“People,” I said. “They leak in

  • The Vision She Hid   128

    The ferry landed in a burst of heat. Air heavy with salt and exhaust pressed against us when the ramp came down. The sun had no merci; it glared at everything and everyone to burn.The road from the docks climbed past warehouses streaked with rust and white salt lines. The tires crunched over gravel. No wind. Only flies and the faint sound of a radio playing an old love song that ended in white noise.We stopped at a square where the smell of baked bread mixed with diesel. A narrow bakery leaned between two houses. Its windows were clouded from flour; the paint on the sign had peeled to faint blue ghosts of letters.Inside, the air was warm and dry. The counters were bare except for three loaves that looked tired but serviceable. An old woman stood behind them. She wore a plain cotton dress and an apron that had been washed too many times. Her hands were white with flour up to the wrists. Her hair was gray and pulled tight. The perfume on her was sweet and old-fashioned; it mixed with

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