The Caller

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The child slept in a pram behind the house.

The pram was from Brio, and the child was an eight-month-old girl. She lay under a crocheted blanket, wearing a matching bonnet with a string fastened under her chin. The pram sat under the shade of a maple tree; behind the tree the forest stood like a black wall. The mother was in the kitchen. She couldn’t see the pram through the window, but she wasn’t concerned about her sleeping baby, not for an instant.

Pottering about thoroughly content, she was light as a ballerina on her feet, not a single worry in her heart. She had everything a woman could dream of: beauty, health and love. A husband, a child, and a home and garden with rhododendrons and lush flowers. She held life in the palm of her hand.

She looked at the three photographs hanging on the kitchen wall. In one photograph, taken under the maple, she wore a flowery dress. In another her husband, Karsten, was on the front porch. The last was a photograph of her and Karsten together on the sofa, the child between them. The girl’s name was Margrete. The arrangement of the three photos made her smile. One plus one is surely three, she thought — it is truly a miracle. Now she saw that miracle everywhere. In the sunlight cascading through the windows, in the thin white curtains fluttering in the breeze.

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