The Choice

thankfulness. But I feel it prickling all across my skin.
He lis me now and deposits me on the ground, on my back, at a
slight distance from the dead bodies. I can see the sky in pieces
between the treetops. I feel the humid air on my face, the damp of the
muddy grass beneath me. I let my mind rest in sensation. I picture my
mother’s long coiled hair, my father’s top hat and mustache.
Everything I feel and have ever felt stems from them, from the union
that made me. They rocked me in their arms. They made me a child of
the earth. I remember Magda’s story about my birth. “You helped
me,” my mother cried to her mother. “You helped me.”
And now Magda is beside me in the grass. She holds her can of
sardines. We have survived the ĕnal selection. We are alive. We are
together. We are free.