These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

The page with her mother’s drawing is gone. The serrated edge of where it’s been ripped from the binding is as fresh as if it were flesh.

Again Molly drops the book in the street. Again she looks around, for some single white leaf blowing in the breeze along the street, and when she doesn’t see it, again she runs.

How many times, Molly frets herself nearly into hysteria in the U-Bahn, has she thought of tearing that page from the book herself? After all, the rest is only a damned book, an overstuffed frame for her mother’s portrait; but exactly because it’s such a frame, exactly because from the beginning it’s provided the picture a context, she’s never brought herself to remove the picture, and now it’s too late.