I’m sitting across from a watery-eyed man with a tight-lipped smile—
there’s a faded ink stain on the cuff of his painfully white dress shirt,
and his glasses don’t quite sit right on his face.
I tell him about the time I stuck my fingers around a candle wick,
The Dutch Orphan is a novel by Ellen Keith about Jewish children who are threatened by deportation from The Netherlands and who are separated from their parents and placed in temporary and precarious housing within Dutch orphanages.
Leaving the gray, bleak evening behind, we enter the massive gothic splendor of stone, stained glass, gilded walls and fluted columns.
every day at edge of the wood
i turn and take that same trail
down past the large pines
through thicket and sedge
where very little light gets through
Who are these black figures, hovering around my bed like the dementors on the Hogwart’s Express? Am I dying? But there’s no bright light. Every breath is a struggle.
Tommy sniffs me at the door, the scruffy dog more polite than enthusiastic. One of his jobs is door monitor. He races back to the man lying in bed in an adjacent room.
The morning dew soaked through the pants on Hans’ suit. He was on his knees, both hands clasped in front of him, as if paying homage to a shrine.
The Dutch Orphan is a novel by Ellen Keith about Jewish children who are threatened by deportation from The Netherlands and who are separated from their parents and placed in temporary and precarious housing within Dutch orphanages.
Out of breath after climbing three flights of stairs to her new apartment, she muscled her way in the door and set down her heavy shopping bags. The apartment was completely empty aside from a few stacks of boxes against the living room wall.