The Morningside

by Téa Obreht

My mother was a small, sinewy, dark-haired woman. In another life she might have been a jockey, but in this one she’d been a mechanic, a carpenter, and, for a little while one unfortunate summer, a hoof scraper.

“Well—few things take longer than a man owning up to a mistake.”

These wounds were kept hidden, a secret known only to Bezi herself. And by showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time, I had robbed her of her solitude in that secret.

“Dogs?” She thought about it. “They have strong skulls and weak stomachs.”

“Why do they have weak stomachs?” “Because they’re scavengers, and they get into a lot of dangerous things, which they have to be able to throw back up quickly.”

There was a lesson here, one two three, I thought later on from the safety of my bed. I must not force my way into more knowledge. When the time was right, the knowledge would present itself,

(“you’ve never met someone so much up his own ass, but he does serve good wine”).

(“Social change is up to time,” Bowen had said. “Very little of it is up to people.”)

What if he was as unaware of his redemption as he had been of his impending downfall? What if his life was continuing along its course without the necessary information?

And were you really part of something if you were part of it alone?