What is this urge we have, to take and to tame, to plant a flag and make it ours? Mountains laid flat, pipelines drilled, verdant body ravaged, beaten and exposed. Children pulled from the bomb-shattered ruins of cities of no longer. A world of ours and never ours.
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Lowercase v-a-g-i. Capital N. Lowercase a.
“Can she read?” The policeman asks.
He asks it like I can’t hear, like I’m not right there, sitting on my father’s lap. I want to tell the policeman that there is no time in my memory when I could not read, that there was never a time when I couldn’t put the letters together and throw myself into any world offered to me and disappear, but I stay quiet.
“Yes, she can read,” my father answers.
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