red ibis red

the sense that they had survived a shipwreck

Only when they deviated from meticulous routine did they run the risk of losing something. So when she heard Fernanda all upset because she had lost her ring, Ursula remembered that the only thing different that she had done that day was to put the mattresses out in the sun because Meme had found a bedbug the night before. Since the children had been present at the fumigation, Ursula figured that Fernanda had put the ring in the only place where they could not reach it: the shelf. Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.

With them he waged the sad war of daily humiliation, of entreaties and petitions, of come-back-tomorrow, of any-time-now, of we're-studying-your-case-with-the-proper-attention; the war hopelessly lost against the many yours-most-trulys who should have signed and would never sign the lifetime pensions. The other war, the bloody one of twenty years, did not cause them as much damage as the corrosive war of eternal postponements.

"Don't you feel well?”she asked her.

At the age of twelve he asked Ursula what was in the locked room. "Papers," she answered. "Melquíades' books and the strange things that he wrote in his last years."

He finally lost all contact with the war. What in other times had been a real activity, an irresistible passion of his youth, became a remote point of reference for him: an emptiness.

Valancy got up and dressed, with a deepening of that curious sense of freedom. When she had finished with her hair she opened the window and hurled the jar of potpourri over into the next lot. It smashed gloriously against the schoolgirl complexion on the old carriage-shop. "I'm sick of the fragrance of dead things," said Valancy.

The famulus seemed to navigate the world as quickly and quietly as it ever had. ("I see in many different ways," was all it would tell her.)

The final ingredient was obvious, in the end. The answer was so simple she could almost weep.

She was more dangerous in high heels with a letter opener than the average warrior with a broadsword, and the goblins realized their mistake too late.

I live without a possible explanation.