The Small Backs of Children

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• In Greek and Roman mythology, each of nine goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), who preside over the arts and sciences. The Muses were both the embodiments and sponsors of performed metrical speech: mousike (hence the English term “Music”) was just “one of the arts of the Muses.” Others included Science, Geography, Mathematics, Philosophy, and especially Art, Drama. Inspiration, stimulus.

• A woman, or powerful force personified as a woman, who is the source of inspiration and agency for a creative artist. An imagined feminine.

You must picture your image of Eastern Europe. In your mind’s eye. Whatever that image is. However it came to you. Winter. That white. .

One winter night when she is no longer a child, the girl walks outside, her shoes against snow, her arms cradling a self, her back to a house not her own but some other. It is a year after the blast that has atomized her entire family in front of her eyes. She is six. It is a house she has lived in with a widow woman who took her in — orphan of war, girl of nothingness.

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