Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.

She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with the white hair, with a daughter and a granddaughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.

Or that’s a lie.

Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull. Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.

There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.

There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.

I bought the audiobook of Fragile Things last night and this morning on the metro, Gaiman reading “Strange Little Girls” brought me to tears. (Yes making me THAT lady on the metro that people avert their eyes from and shuffle-walk away).

My favorite scrap from SLG is this:

“Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop.

You will never see her again. Whenever it rains you will think of her“

If you haven’t read anything of Neil Gaiman’s, do so immediately. I was filled with such a sense of loss after I finished American Gods, knowing that one of the best things I could ever read was behind me now.

I know this has segwayed into rambling, so if you have made it this far, what opened this post is one of the snippets from “Strange Little Girls”, called “raining blood“. I’ll put up the rest sometime, and maybe the audiobook file.