I shouted it across the street to a startled American classmate. The car whizzed past and the last fragments of my mother's language were exhumed as I stood, baffled by their antiquity, her rust in my mouth.
C begins with the menacing hiss of sss and then the high-pitched wail of the eeeeee.
It is us, backing off from all that is crazed, the entire curve of our backbones distorted by fear. Wystan, my brother, lets out a small cry . The sound of e is the sound of failure, high-pitched screaming. I and my mother read a book with cardboard pages. The sentences are stiff.