Lola Haskins

Does not mean silence. The absence of moon in the day sky for example. Does not mean barely to speak, the way a child's whisper makes only warm air on his mother's right ear. To play pianissimo is to carry sweet words to the old woman in the last dark row who cannot hear anything else, and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.

That year there were many deaths in the village. Germs flew like angels from one house to the next and every family gave up its own. Mothers died at their mending. Children fell at school. Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left. Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one died. And the angels whispered among themselves. And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps, your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck when all the trees were still. And he would tell us always, how he had felt that night, on the skin of his own neck, the angels, passing.