Free Whisper by Chris Struyk-Bonn Page A

his plate.
    The black fabric was soft, and it fell just past my shoulders. The weight of it felt right, the material heavy enough to stay in place, the weave loose enough to see through. It smelled of nutmeg and cumin. It must have been my mother’s, a shawl to warm her neck and shoulders rather than hide her face. I should have been enraged, angry that my face had to be covered, that I was so hideous they couldn’t eat while my face was visible, but I was not angry. Instead, all that rage leaked out like smoke from beneath the black veil, and I allowed myself to smile. This was my mother’s. And now when people stared at me, I could curl my lips into a snarl, I could cry, I could laugh, I could wrinkle my nose and glare. They couldn’t see me.
    When David and Mateo left for school and Belen left to do his work for the town council, I ate the remains of the breakfast. I didn’t remove the veil but rolled up the edge and slipped my fork carefully beneath it. It made me feel hazy, vaporous, as if maybe I didn’t really exist and all of this was someone else’s life. With my face covered, the world became less substantial, and the life in my head, as I wished it to be, became almost real.

    My life might have been despicable right then, but I also walked the path my mother had walked before me. I cleaned the dishes and put them away, I picked up clothes from the floor in the main room, found a cloth and ran it over the meager furniture: a couch, a round table in the middle of the room. Some puzzles and a few books sat on the table. I looked at the books. Holy Bread: The Art of Bread Making. I silently thanked Nathanael for teaching me to read, to do math, to study life. I would learn to make the bread. My mother had told me that she loved smoothing and kneading the bread until it became a stretchy, soft dough that would expand into a perfect loaf. She had begun to add nuts, bits of fruit, seeds and wild grains, making the recipes her own and selling the special breads at the grocery store. They’d become dependent on the income from that bread, as it supplemented the limited amount of money Belen received from sitting on the town council.
    I cleaned in David and Mateo’s room first—made a stack of the dirty clothes, pulled the bedding off their beds, picked up their toys and tossed them onto the shelves made of boards and bricks. When I opened a thin door that covered a miniature room, I sighed and began to pull out the piles of clothes. Why did they need so many clothes? So many shirts, pants, socks. In our camp in the woods, we had received our supplies once a month, ordering new clothes through the messenger twice a year. I owned one set of clothing that fit: a pair of brown pants, a white T-shirt with a faded picture of a large-eared mouse, a black sweater with a hole at the right elbow and a pair of brown shoes. These children had ten pairs of pants each, fifteen shirts, short pants, sweaters and coats. They only had one body each—why did they need so many pieces of clothing?
    A mouse had been nibbling on something in the corner, a wad of chewed paper that crumbled like snow when I picked it up. I began to realize the extent of the mess and wondered how long my mother had been gone. Maybe she had died the day she sent the violin. That was weeks ago. And then my father had waited until my birthday to come and get me?
    With no looming father, no staring brothers, I could explore as I wished. I found a washbasin behind the house. I looked around me, trying to determine how people washed clothes in this village, and saw a woman walking through the brush of the neighboring backyards to some taller grasses. The forest began just past those taller grasses. Perhaps a creek lay in that direction. I placed the clothes in the washbasin and balanced it against my hip as I’d done for years in our camp. I walked parallel to the woman down a narrow path lined with browning weeds and found