Luís’s Reviews > The living sea of waking dreams > Status Update

Anna had no idea what she would say to Lisa Shahn as she heard herself speaking slowly and confidently, explaining that she was the woman on the plane, the one who had lost her hand and who now just might be losing her head. She had seen a picture of a dead charred rainbow lorikeet, such a beautiful bird, and it had broken her heart. She hoped it wasn't presumptuous, but she had a question.

(...) Another priest's lawyer dismissed the oral rape of an altar boy as no more than a plain, vanilla sexual penetration case. How? thought Anna. Two weeks after a fire destroyed a district, a second fire swept through, burning all the burnt materials. How was it possible?

Unless, that is, she did as Terzo demanded.
After leaving the pub, she went to the hospital. The ward lights were dimmed, and in the late-night languor particular to hospitals, she saw a stranger sitting silently with Francie, a man so young his thick beard seemed a bad theatre drop.
He slowly turned to her, smiled, and said, Hello, Auntie Annie.

There is so much beauty in this world, Francie said in a soft crackle, as if astonished by a discovery that had taken an entire life to be revealed. And yet we never see it until it is too late.

And sitting with her ill mother in that anonymous hospital ward, Anna sometimes found herself envying Francie terribly, happy for her and astonished by her. For Francie had paid the price, and she was not alone.

Really, the new hand felt normal, no different from her old hand. It was impossible to say why she felt so oddly about it, thought Anna. It was her hand, after all. Except somehow, looking at it, in a way she had no words to describe, it no longer was.