Death Bliss
I have been waiting, without admitting I was waiting, for the day she would bring me the page that made the suspicion a fact.
She stops in front of me. The candle flame gutters in the draft from the corridor's far end, and the light jumps across her face, and for a moment I can see the fourteen-year-old girl whose mother walked out and never came back, the girl who learned to need no one because needing was the wound that would not close. Then the light steadies, and she is twenty-six again, and she is holding a notebook in her free hand. It is not the notebook my uncle confiscated. It is smaller, cheaper, the kind of spiral-bound pad you can buy at a stationer's in any town with a single ma