THIRTY-THREE

Early 1963

And end now with a girl on her stomach in a basement, quietly finishing a map. It is the world contained within twelve square blocks, a cemetery at its heart, stones and obelisks telling their news of the living and the dead. Waves meet the shore on a stretch of ocean facing south. A school receives its neighbourhood of children, some of them riding bikes and some of them climbing up and over the rocky hill where clumps of shooting stars grow in an elegant seclusion, where lizards are born in a miracle of adaptation in the ferny clefts. A map of houses and days, of secrets and details noticed by a child fiercely in love with the pattern trees make with their shadows in sunlight, of the softening touch of moss on an inscription set in motion in a box canyon where lovers lay in dry grass and dreamed of a future now collapsed by violence. Off the edges of the map, the world settles its story and what can anyone do but remember the route water takes through the decades on its singular journey to the sea.