WHEN GALAI OPENED HER EYES that autumn morning, she found herself looking directly into the utter blackness at the edges of Earth. The whites of her mother’s eyes were so clear, the black looked stultifying, like a murder of crows attempting to blot out a cloud. The red ring around the black was merely imagined, she was sure of it, a foreboding sign that she had come to associate with her mother. She leaned back into her pillow, hoping to sink into nothingness, to fall, haphazardly, into a private space that her dead brother and father occupied, but the sound of Ommi’s breath, a hiss that sounded more steaming radiator than human, pulled her out of herself.
“Get on up now, Galai,” Ommi said and quickly stood, as if she’d been talking to herself, walking over to the light switch to wave it on. The room was suddenly an eruption of yellow—butterscotch light dripping from the ceiling, heavy medallion yellow of the curtains, scrubbed canary, bumblebee, daffodil, dandelion yellows of the quilt, her mother’s voice, too, burnt honey yellow. Colors to brighten the mood of the room, Ommi had said, in one of her rare attempts to sweep up sorrow and burn it in the garden. The sound of crisp dead leaves shaking free from the pin oaks penetrated the room.
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