Aryeh Davidson’s Reviews > Heartstones > Status Update

When she fell I was not looking. She screamed in the air….. That I remember and the sound her body made when it struck the ground, a crash that was both hard and soft at the same time. She lay down there on the stones we call hearts and wheaten there was blood or not I cannot say, for her dress was too red to show it.

The reality is a baby the older sibling is forbidden to touch, for how would that elder one choose to ‘play’ with the interloper, the thief of a parent’s love? By beating it to death, by stamping on its face, by taking the feeble wriggling body to the river and watching the current carry it away downstream. Those are the games to play with a new brother or sister - if opportunity is given.

Rosemary is one of the women, gossipy, given to inane chat, a mine of clichés, Luke says, which made me see a deep cave and men on their knees with picks and hammers, mining clichés out from between the strata: here’s another, ‘He broke his heart,’ and another, ‘It was a merciful release!’