Following the Summer by Lise Bissonnette Page B

but rounder, her face softer around eyelids that were still overly made-up. Marie didn’t understand.
    Corrine greeted her, laughing, took a long time to clean the big empty refrigerator, then she switched off the lights and went to the front to close up. She pulled a stool up to the cash drawer which had to be counted, and leaned on her elbows briefly to look at her. “I’m pregnant,” she said. A radio at the end of the counter droned the sports news.

Fourteen
    N O ONE WOULD EVER KNOW WHERE THE child had come from, the child she dared not kill. Pietro had wanted it furiously, thought it was his, from him. He saw a fence around the aging womb, and from that cage would be born a dark-haired girl with the curly head of southern Italy, whom he would one day show off while the cousins looked on. She would wear a dress as yellow as the sun, in a town square covered with dust.
    It was a boy with tawny hair, and his ivory complexion would make him a local man. Pietro saw him once, his face impenetrable, eyes closed on the secret, motionless in a refusal that was not sleep. This creature had been forged between the thighs of a woman who had shunned his seed before accepting others, he forebade the child any journey out, any return. He had broken the cage and there would be no other.
    This time Pietro would be discovered, twice dead, first poisoned, then drowned in the lake that washed him back to shore, just one more piece of trash.
    The start of summer. The women saw that the child’s eyes would be reddish-brown. He gave off an odour of acid that they would smell on their own skin long after. They gave him no name because they knew none for a child of that race, one who was made of lime and flint.
    Very early he had the powerful breath of those beings whose lives will be long. He murmured cries without tears, a language of his own, carved from the very silence that others would maintain as they approached him.
    Corrine feared the curse that was every day more present in the child’s sandy eyes. First her breasts dried up, then her throat. Small creases formed at the edge of her shoulders, she thought she saw the bones peek through under the friable flesh. She would be the desert from which only scorpions emerged, now that she had driven away the animal of all her nights. No shadows now, no games, she would be an old woman and a child would reduce her to its own bright space. The paper came away from the walls, there were fires under the floors, and warnings that condemned the house. The neighbours left, she stayed behind, alone; in July the block would be razed.
    Marie hovered over the child, serene. She put honey in his milk and answered his cries with phrases that, in the end, were stories. Wherein one could drink salt and eat oils, crush serpents and cast stones. Everything was possible in stories that no one but they would dare to know.
    At three o’clock, on a day of brilliant sunshine, they went back to the park. Under a tree a radio was shrieking, a number of them were jumping around, young and pale. Two nearly naked girls danced on the moss. A languor fell like soot and drove them away, with the child, to where the burned stones were.
    Nothing moved now in the undergrowth or along rocks dry to their roots. Not a dog. Muffled pounding came from the water tower, a mirage that quivered deep inside the light. “They’re tearing it down,” says Corrine. How does she know? From the child, a cry, softly.
    It was then that Marie saw the lake, its rust marbled now with mauve water weeds that sprang from new crevices. The meeting with Isis. “It’s midnight in the middle of day, the moons devour you alive, your blood will wet the stone for all eternity, reeds will grow from it. Ivy. Bonds. Lilacs bred of dead waters. The wound would be nothing, she had said, this woman whose shadow still covers your ankles. Her bones jut out now, they cut, they tear. She has no saliva. And you, you will