excerpt from "Undulations of Peace"

She couldn’t feel her legs. She remembered back to when she was just thirteen—the time her mother told her she couldn’t get up until she had finished that impossible piece of music. (She tried to explain to her obdurate mother that Rachmaninoff was too difficult—even for a “precocious young girl” like herself.)

Her legs felt just the same then as they did now. She unconsciously began to hum the song – probably to distract herself from the screaming. She closed her eyes and her mother—as she was then—came before her. She saw her beautiful face and remembered—with nostalgia as unforgiving as it was poignant—the love that had permeated her home and filled her heart in its overflow. And then she began to weep, uncontrollably. She wept for the little things that only she and her mother knew and had shared together. She wept for the people in the next room, whose heart-wrenching cries, if she lived, would be with her the rest of her life. But most of all, she wept for him. She wept as she remembered the inimitable kindness in his smile and the simple but pure light in his eye for all things.

As the hours crept along in agony, she noticed how muddy everything was becoming inside of her. Her heart, more than her pounding head and tightly bound hands and feet, felt the torture and the pain of that moment. She was unable to brush away the blood and sweat from her face—but more than that—she couldn’t brush away the indignity that covered her soul.