Rifles Rifles 1. How those killers thrilled me, looming above Grandma's fireplace, bayonets in their sheaths, there with the Christmas cards, candles, hand-made pine cone wreathes and two ceramic squirrels. Russians used them against Japan, 1905.
History always comes home.
She'd pull one down. I'd seen pictures of soldiers hunkering through mud or oil or scorched island sand, the dead washed ashore like kelp. I'd reverently pull off the sheath. Along the blade ran a deep groove, a channel in the bright steel. That's the blood gutter, this grey-eyed lover of dahlias explained, who had read to me Peter Rabbit, Red Riding Hood, and The Pirate Don Derke of Dowdee.