As she carried the pot of coffee back to her room across the hallway, she noticed the flutter of a postcard, which, upon having been pushed by the mailman through a special slit, settled on the floor. It was from her son, of whose death the Chernobylskis had just learned by more advanced postal means, in consequence of which the lines (virtually inexistent) that she now read, standing with the coffeepot in one hand, on the threshold of her sizable but inept room, could have been compared by an objective observer to the still visible beams of an already extinguished star. My darling Moolik (her
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