dare take it.
Furious, Grandmother spat an insult back. âEasy enough to be Man of Thunder behind your counter along with all the food. Try joining us here in thequeue. Youâll soon find out youâre nothing but a common cur!â
He thrust his greasy face closer, oozing threat. âAre you dissatisfied with what your country has to offer you?â
Grandmother stiffened. Perhaps she sensed what I saw â that people whoâd been standing in line behind her in the face-biting wind for two full hours were suddenly melting away as if theyâd that very instant decided their family had no need of food that day. Coming to her senses, Grandmother grabbed my arm and moved as quickly as her stiff legs could carry her, not towards home, but up one alley and down another, and in and out of courtyards, till she was sure no one was following.
Then, gasping until she breathed more easily, she raised her wrinkled monkey face to look me up and down as if to check I really were no longer the little boy whose hand had to be held the whole way home.
âGo on ahead,â she told me.
âWhy?â
ââWhy?
Why
?ââ Sheer irritation made her slap out at me. âMust you always be wise as a tree full of owls? Stop asking questions! Do as I say! Go home.â
I didnât argue. The way led past Alyoshaâs house. Heâd been my friend as long as I could remember.We had a thousand ways of passing time together. In summer we chewed stalks on the canal bank. In winter he let me take turns on his sled with him and his sister. Always, at school, we fought to sit side by side. Ordered so firmly home, I didnât think Iâd dare knock on his familyâs door. But maybe heâd be in the street, out on some errand, and we could spend a bit of time down at the river watching the breaking ice float past in giant lumps.
He wasnât there. I kicked a stone past his door, and back again. But in the end I gave up and hurried home, and it must have been a couple of hours or more before it even struck me that Grandmother must have sent me on ahead for fear the shopkeeper would call for the guards. If they were looking for the pair of malcontents the shopkeeper had described, all they would come across was an idle lad trailing his way home from school and, a street or so over, some ancient biddy trudging back all alone from the market.
Never before had I seen Grandmother so pale from a spat with a shopkeeper. Or scurrying down alleys. But still I didnât realize how much the world around us was changing, or how our lives were shrinking by the day, until the evening I slapped my last ace down on hers and, for the first time ever, gotto crow back at her the boast she always made the moment her cards trumped mine:
âFor some, the crystal stair! For others, just the road of bones!â
My mother smiled. âHas Yuri grown up enough to beat you at last? Or are your brains going soft?â
âNeither,â snapped Grandmother. âItâs just that, with the boy being cooped up so much, heâs turning into a cardsharp.â
I looked up. Sure enough, the shutters were open to catch the last of the evening breeze. It was still light. Why wasnât I outside, racing along the canal bank with Alyosha, or looking for mischief up back streets?
Because no one roamed now. It wasnât just the splatters of gunfire heard from other streets, or even the occasional dull crump of explosions echoing across the city. It was a creeping sense of fear that had turned all our lives into one long, long wait.
And fed suspicion. I sensed my parents no longer trusted my blank face when they were whispering. I noticed their friends stopped coming to the house, and I was no longer welcome knocking on other peopleâs doors, even Alyoshaâs. But though I must have asked a host of questions over that long, dreary autumn, my parentsâ answers were evasive andguarded. And,
Irene Garcia, Lissa Halls Johnson