Ariel's Quiet Light

g waiting before a storm. Ariel remembers the scent of her mother's shawl, warm and cinnamon-laced, the way the shawl had always smelled like safety. She remembers the sunlight th

ght, Ariel woke because the house was quieter than normal; the hum of the radio wasn't there. She padded to the corridor, barefoot, clumsy with sleep, fingertips tracing familiar bumps in the plast

erase sorrow. Ariel's father came and stood at the doorway the whole day, a silhouette that frightened her less than the way he seemed to become less his own person. It was the first time she noticed his hands were long, pale, the na

of them laughing in the small kitchen. She wrapped herself in the shawl one evening when the house felt like a cave. The smell was only a faint memory, bu

foot of the mango tree and talk to it as though branches might be sympathetic. Other times, quietness sat on her shoulders like a shawl, and she watched adults

ter prospects," "it's for your future," and there was the look he wore in the mornings, collared and new, that said decisions had been made without her. Ariel loved the movement of packing: the settling of books and toys into

or. Ariel pressed her cheek to the window and watched the countryside flatten into strips, familiar mango trees replaced with buildings and the small, brig

d white. Her father moved about with a new set of carefulness: he kept his distance, spoke in clipped sentences, sometimes returned late, and sometimes did not return at all. He gave

ies about her mother, her father would smile the way one smiles at a dog catching its tail, kind but weary. Once, when Ariel asked where her mother had gone, her father told her, car

hadow that hides cruelty. Ariel could not name it then. She simply felt the world tilt toward a