Chapter 71

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I dream of the house where we used to live, back before the war when my da was alive and Delia wasn’t yet my responsibility, when the Outlands were just row upon row of suburban houses, grassy lots, schools and office parks and shopping malls. Before the first of the bombs wiped that away, before I had to grow up in a hurry and leave all I loved behind, before I had to move Delia into the city with its squalid streets and crumbling buildings and trash-strewn alleys. In the dream is the time when I was eight and all was right in the world, my da was the strongest of men, my ma delicate and swollen with child, the future on the brink of the horizon and mine for the taking. Even in sleep, the memory of that small clapboard house, with its wraparound porch and tree-lined, chain-link fence, is enough to make my throat close with nostalgia. I hate knowing that I’ll have to wake up and lose it all over again.