Estrella

My heart stopped in the moment Father’s did. I have a vague and distant sense of being moved—someone says Father may be crushed if we don’t—but no idea where I’m being sent. The noise of the ballroom dampens. There’s less screaming, or at least, less outside of my head.

Father is dead. Not half an hour ago, I was dancing with him. And now, he’s a body on a slab. That’s the only way to describe the surface the soldiers place him on. A plank of wood, like a bed stripped of all its dressings. There’s nowhere to hide on the slab, nothing to disguise the chilling stillness of...