“Right,” my father says.
Just then Lanie comes down the stairs, her nightgown fluttering around her.
“Where were you?” she asks me, but doesn’t stop moving for an answer. She walks out the front door, lifting her arms like wings as she walks down the front steps in a way that says she will banish Jack. She floats lightly, bouncing on bare toes.
We follow her out, riveted, waiting for her to tell us what to do next. She spins at the end of the driveway, a ghostly twirl in the night.
“It’s time we all went home,” she says. Watch this small thing, says the arch of each of her feet stepping; watch this because it means everything. This foot making gentle contact with the earth, this is how we will survive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAUD CASEY’s stories have been published in The Threepenny Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Georgia Review, Confrontation, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner. She received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention for her story “Dirt.” Casey’s debut novel, The Shape of Things to Come, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Casey’s new novel, Genealogy, will be published in 2005. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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