Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad . . . Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold . . . Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “I can.” Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face. • Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem, 1935–1940”

Monks live there, she’d told him, and when he’d asked what’s a monk, she’d answered: a person who wants to escape the world.

pert

compunction

The language of those beginning to shed their childhood: all gestures and subtext, all reserve and disdain.

gibbous

scrim

effaces.

predation;

if the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright.

It would happen everywhere, here and there at first, then all over, and eventually the news would stop reporting the stories, because they weren’t new anymore.

fathomless

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror