There was always the smell of linseed oil and terpentine and greyish, dirty-looking rags around. And there was a great big book on the coffee table of famous paintings. I hadn't seen my father for two years.
There were pictures of throngs of angels and chubby cupids with naked rumps and kneeling, Immaculate Virgins. My father seemed a teeny bit uneasy that I preferred to sit on the couch with the large book of pictures, rather than move around.
Unfathomably deep, the roar of a plane, passing over, consoled me. I was a tall girl but still uncentered and not yet transformed into a stable, feminine soul. The years without my father, whom, in my heart, I felt more comfortable with and liked best, were clearly leaving their mark on my eventual transition into womanhood.
Like the star prizefighter, I had been coached, two years earlier, by my mother, beforehand, on what to say to the Judge, when time came for awarding custody. It was my complete spiritual undoing that I hadn't been spontaneous and chosen my father Although, as my mother always reminded me, he never did the caring for me.
A patch of light, like a hand on a sundial, moved an increment along the hardwood floor.
In a vertical city divided between those above the mist and those below it, four strangers are drawn together as failing systems threaten everyone. To save Halidom, they'll have to cross boundaries, uncover forgotten technology, and repair more than
