If left unchecked, I would stay supine beneath the day until I was supine beneath the night. I think most three-year-olds are so thrilled by the novelty of motor function in an exciting environment that they can’t help themselves from running and climbing and toddling about uncontrollably until stopped, but I always got caught on things instead. It describes me very well to say that I get snagged easily, but I don’t mean physically. At three, I would get distracted by something and let it absorb me. An ant crawling across concrete could have taken my entire afternoon, or the sound of wind dancing through the garden, or my love: the vast and patient sky. Words were the same, especially when I was trying to communicate in the language my father spoke. Sounds would get snagged behind my teeth and never want to come out. Concentration has forever been a strength of mine, all the way to a fault.

Keti came and got me when it started to rain, grumbling aloud about the miserable place we were living as she pulled me along like the rain might melt us. I knew I liked the rain, though, because it kind of tickled when it dripped through my hair and that made me giggle.

We jogged through grass and around all the big white statues installed to make the place look palatial, but Keti was going too fast for my tiny legs to keep up. She was holding my arm, though, so I couldn’t fall back and eventually one of the freshly dug holes in the landscape grabbed my uncoordinated foot and I fell right in.

Her grip was so strong around my hand that I took her down with me as I fell. I was small, of course, but so too was my mother. She wasn’t even twenty years old yet, and though she might have seemed mighty from my perspective, she was slight and short, nearly as much a child as I was.

I’d hurt my knee in the fall, and was starting to get upset about it. That frustration for my uncoordinated body and an even less coordinated world was balling up inside me to come out as tears, but Keti broke my concentration when she started to laugh.

“We are all mud!” She cackled, wiping a bit of earth off of her leg.

It was the strange language, which she spoke when the tall man was around, but I understood it enough to repeat the word “m-mud” with a giggle. My first impression of my mother, beyond all the rest of her presence, was that she was hilarious. No one else ever made me laugh, but Keti could make anything funny if she was in the right mood. The mood wasn’t permanent, but that afternoon beneath the rain, she was doing something very much like playing with me.

With mud coating her fingers, she touched the end of my nose and my cheeks, laughing even more boisterously as she said “you are like a small…eh…souris—mouse! Mort the little mouse!”

“M-mouse! M-Mort m-mouse!” I gaily repeated, and reached up to touch her nose, too. But Keti could only shine over me, and colour my skin; I could never reach her.

The levity of that moment was just like rain, it tickled and it made me happy and I felt a sensation that I can only now label as ‘safe.’ Even my knee didn’t hurt any longer.

She was in less of a rush to get to the house after our moment in the mud, and she giggled with me all the rest of the way through the garden, not yanking me anymore.

I didn’t like The Glass Hollow itself, I didn’t like the way the air felt inside, and I especially didn’t like that I could look through one of the milliard windows and see the garden, where it was so much easier to breathe. The thing I liked the least, however, was the man who always seemed to catch up to me no matter which room I was in.