Across the Nightingale Floor [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE My mother used to threaten to tear me into eight pieces if I knocked over the M^ater bucket, or pretended not to hear her calHng me to come home as the dusk thickened and the cicadas' shrilling increased. I would hear her voice, rough and fierce, echoing through the lonely valley. 'Where's that wretched boy? I'll tear him apart when he gets back.' But when I did get back, muddy from sliding down the hillside, bruised from fighting, once bleeding great spouts of blood from a stone wound to the head (I still /e the scar, like a silvered thumbnail), there would be u. ri fire, and the smell of soup, and my mother's arms not tearing me apart but trying to hold me, clean my face, or straighten my hair, while I twisted like a lizard to get away from her. She was strong from endless hard work, and not old: she'd given- birth to me before she was