Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Do you guys remember Found Magazine?  Turns out it still exists, I just haven’t thought about it in a while.  I used to send shit to them all the time!  And I still enjoy the odd found piece of ephemera.  The other day, while walking down a particularly stretch of road in Red Hook, Brooklyn, I found a crumpled piece of paper that had fallen out of what was clearly someone’s printed novel manuscript.  Herewith, the excerpt––what do we think?  Is it good?

“Adam didn’t even want to let her in,” the old woman continues, as though Ava hadn’t spoken.  “But I thought: Why not, after all these years.  What harm could it really do.”  She gives a rueful laugh.  “She used to make fun of me for that.  How gullible I was.  People don’t really change, in the end.  Do they.  My mother––she was a psychoanalyst––used to tell me that.  They may defy expectations.  But they don’t change.”

She is leaning against the door now, her eyes distant behind her glasses.  “But of course.  I thought there still was a chance.  I brought her upstairs, all smiles and welcome.  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”

Ava blinks.  “Boy?”

“Nothing.”  The thin lips twist bitterly.  “Just my own gullibility.  I gave her iced tea and a bit of lemon shortbread.”  She is staring not at Ava, but at the table between them.  “When she first apologized, I thought it was simply over never having said goodbye to us.  You see, she’d come to see me before I left.  She brought me a book.  And she’d promised to come back, but she never did.”  She shakes her head.  “When she told me she’d really been spying on us, at first I didn’t understand.  I thought she was making some sort of horrid joke.  But then she was crying, and saying how ashamed she was of her behavior, and how she wanted to apologize to Franz in person as well.  And I finally put it together: the Gestapo took my brother away because she’d given him away to them.  It was her fault.”

She takes a sharp, shaking breath in.  “I told her Franz was dead.  That they’d come for him because of her.”  She locks eyes with Ava, unblinking.  “I told her she was a murderer.”

This is from page 439, by the way.  For whatever that’s worth.  I guess it’s a climax, of sorts.  I mean, if calling someone a murderer isn’t at least an extremely dramatic moment, I don’t know what is.