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Back Things that Fall from the Sky Save as PDF
Chapters (55)
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  2. Title
  3. A Walled-In Girl
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  30. The Five Lightning Strikes of Hamish Mackay
  31. The Five Lightning Strikes of Hamish Mackay
  32. A Mermaid Splashing
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  42. And That was The End of That
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The three aunts were real, but two of them died while I was still the Lovely Baby. Auntie Marshmallow was alive and in a care home. Sometimes I went with Mum to visit her there. Auntie Marshmallow lay in bed and Mum told her about the garden and the vegetable patch, and asked for advice about how to look after some of the plants, though she never followed it.

In the end it turned out that Auntie Marshmallow lived longer than Mum. She was brought to the funeral in a wheelchair. She sat there with a confused expression on her face, as if she didn’t understand what was going on. Her skin looked as thin as tissue paper. The floral wreath trembled in her hands, and eventually, someone picked it up from her lap and placed it on Mum’s coffin. That’s when Auntie Marshmallow became agitated and her wheelchair was pushed away.

That wasn’t the last time I saw Auntie Marshmallow; I went to see her again with Dad. We were living at the manor house then, but because Dad didn’t want to talk about Mum and wasn’t able to talk about the vegetable patch, we didn’t go again.

After Mum’s death, Dad’s story became crushed ice. Once, he tried to tell it, but when he got to the part where Mum crosses the river, he stopped.

Mum was interrupted, and we couldn’t tell the end of her story. Mum was a character in a fairy tale who rose from a river and wandered through dark, gloomy forests to the Soviet Union and Lapland and back. And if characters like that die, they don’t die in vain, and stupidly. They don’t abandon the Lovely Baby, whose clothes they warm in front of the fire; at least, they don’t go away without leaving a message. I waited for a message for a long time. I read books and thought that one day, a letter would fall out of one of them and everything would be resolved. Or perhaps Mum would have underlined some sentences and all I had to do was find the right book. And I thought about time and the fact that in those underlined words, Mum would be here and now, even if it were only one more time.

Auntie Marshmallow remained in the care home. The Lovely Baby was covered by a wall panel and we moved to Extra Great Manor.

It was a bad ending, but it was the best we could do.

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