Few things come back to me with this much clarity.

I am ten. I walk by the shore just outside Kōzu with my two brothers, twins, and five years older than me. It is a cold December day, a blustery wind harassing the waves, pushing them up against the shore in riotous piles. Across the bay to the north Mount Fuji rises up, twenty miles away, perhaps thirty – I am too young to know distances. Its white cap is barely distinguishable from the heavy clouds, only a certain solidity marking where its sweeping sides begin and the grey mist ends.

January 1940

Northeastern Finland

The Winter War -- Finland versus the Soviet Union

The tundra clearing rang with the sound of bullets. It was almost dusk now, on the third day of fighting, and snow was still falling. It covered the ground in layers and sprayed upwards in a cloud of white whenever a stray bullet punctured the dirt underneath. The riflemen had begun taking shifts to shovel the snow out of the trenches, and, like the battle itself, it was never-ending labor. Every shovelful that was flung out and upwards by frosty fingertips was soon replaced with fresh precipitation.

Dear Kafka,

It’s a great pity knowing that you died thinking you were a failure. You were my very first love. Now

don’t scoff at me from the other world. Your dreams are now my dreams or I wish to make them mine. I

desperately want to know what you felt when you wrote ‘Letters to Melina’. Was it joy? Was it despair?

Was it jealousy? Or was it the feeling of an unrequited love? You really do live up to your name. Don’t

you? You are a crow who likes to get lost in the shimmery sadness and in the dreams of others. For once

The day he died—February 3, 1959—was “The Day the Music Died,” or so claimed Don McLean in his eponymous hit record. But The Big Bopper, born

Jiles

Perry

Richardson

Jr.

did not lead a life that was the stuff of feature films, unlike the legends of the other passengers on that star-marked airplane: Buddy Holly, Richie Valens.

The woman in the house across the street decides to leave. A man walks out of a bar and disappears. In California, half a million people all look up at the sky, and find that there is nothing out of the ordinary.

On the shoulder of a highway two brothers kiss in the back of a car while their father sleeps in the front seat. Another man in another car, going forty miles an hour in a one hundred-mile zone, shakes his head at something said on the radio. A house in the middle of nowhere, recently foreclosed: the wallpaper in the living room slowly peels away.

When I was a girl, my grandmother told me a Devi saved her life during a four-story suicide leap the year China went Red. Me on her lap, she told how she toed the building ledge, staring out over the network of alleyways smothered in smoke and screams.

Phoebe, having finished her stockings, started on her husband’s shirts and then, with Rose, tackled the vegetable garden while Rose told her stories about her brother’s exploits at Salamanca, which sounded like a lark, at least in her telling. Phoebe held the wholly unfounded belief that she might have made a good soldier, which she voiced as she pulled a doll-sized radish out of the earth and shook it firmly. Laughing, Rose shielded herself from the spray of dirt.

Marina woke to hushed conversations from the kitchen. Three voices, including Lee's, all low and serious.

Marina and Lee had lived apart now for six months, she and the girls here in Irving, Lee renting an apartment twenty minutes away in Dallas. He said he had good work there, though never offered specifics. Only on weekends did he stay with them. At first, the arrangement embarrassed her; they'd been married just two years. But she quickly came to appreciate the space it gave her from his increasingly frequent rants and demands.