The Morningside

by Téa Obreht

There was Bezi Duras. Looking at Ena. Then looking at me. Smiling only with her mouth. I made the mistake of meeting her gaze. If her voice had erupted in my head, I would not have been surprised. It seemed already present in everything, an oceanic boom all around me. She knew. She knew I was hiding something. In fact, there might be nothing Bezi Duras did not know. That my mother was a foundling. That I had failed to kick the habit of laying out protections. That a man I’d never seen before had pulled down his pants in front of me in a Paraiso alleyway, and that I had run away shouting, as well as a thousand other secrets I had willed myself to forget, all the little sins that had scattered into the unlit corners of my heart: That I used to cry myself to sleep, praying for my father’s return. That I knew the taste of flesh because I had once eaten meat—inadvertently, when a patron of the hotel where my mother worked had offered me a bite of it as I passed her table, and I (three or so, underfoot) had leaned in and gummed it off the end of her fork without a second thought, to the horror of my mother, who was watching from the corner, or so she kept telling me, because I had no memory of this event, though my mother had relived it often enough for me to form a kind of half reel of it, all in the third person. All this knowledge Bezi Duras carried through the main gate and out into the street, where the dogs hauled her up the darkening hill and out of sight.