Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

13

She explained it to me later as she handed me the clean sheet. Expressionless but for that look of appraisal which she always wore in my presence, mouth thinned almost to invisibility and eyes barbed-wire jags in her pallor.

“It’s the curse come early,” she said. “You’d better have these.”

And she gave me a wad of muslin squares, almost like a child’s diapers. She didn’t tell me how to use them.

“Curse?” I’d stayed away all day in the tree house, expecting to die. Her lack of expression infuriated and confused me. I’d always loved drama. I’d imagined myself dead at her feet, flowers at my head. A marble gravestone-Beloved Daughter. I’d told myself that I must have seen Old Mother without knowing it. I was cursed.