Such was the quality of night in the Old Country, or what they then knew as the true dark, which, when the sun fell from its daily perch, was total and unyielding. What else could they have hoped for, with no moon in the sky? Your lola put a cigarette out on the wall. When she pulled the cigarette away, there was left on the cream-colored surface a small black scorch mark. “They called it the Burn,” she said. The hole in the tapestry of the sky that the Moon once called home, or so went one of your lola’s less likely tales; how, after one of the First Men unstitched the Moon from the sky with
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