The Sunken Cathedral by Kate Walbert Page B

away, in history, the bell rings, the child hiding up a tree. But she will not go home and she will not go home and even though the bell clangs she will never go home.
    “Hello? Hello?” Sid Morris says, knocking on her cast with his free hand. “Are you with me?”
    “I’m here,” she says. “I’m still here,” she says.
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    I . The man with the thick beard and the woman unwrapped her in a warm place. In the dark she felt her own shivering. The woman rubbed her legs with warm hands. Someone lit a candle. She was in a shop of some sort, photographs on the walls, portraits of people sitting for portraits, men and women and little children arranged like fruit on a raked wooden table, children looking serious and strange, dressed in their best dress. They did not look like her parents or like Ernest and Rose and Sylvie. She thought of Ernest and Rose and Sylvie and then she did not; she shut her eyes hard and the woman spoke to her and said she would bring her a cup of tea now that she looked awake and maybe it would not be too hot to taste and would that be fine?
    Marie nodded, a mouse nod.
    She might be a little mouse in someone’s pocket; she might burrow into a fluff of cotton. She would like to speak but she is a mouse and so can only squeak.
    Don’t, the woman said to her little mouse voice. Don’t speak.
    The woman came back and put a cup of tea into her tiny mouse hands, her tiny claws, and the woman held the tea as well so that Marie would not spill it because she was shaking, shivering, and the tea felt too hot and so she coughed.
    I’m sorry, she said in her real voice.
    And the woman said to the man, Too soon.
    And then the woman said something else to the man that Marie did not understand, something in a language she did not understand, and then the man picked her up again and carried her through a smaller door to a dark room where there were no portraits only boxes stacked upon boxes and a wooden table and chair and a cot and here the man set her down and the woman came behind with blankets and said, Sleep.
    And Marie nodded.
    And the woman asked her name but Marie had turned into a tiny mouse, again, like the kind that used to sneak into the kitchen when her mother made stone soup. Nothing for you, little mouse, her mother would say. Not even a crumb. And Marie would watch the mouse circle around and around, looking for anything, and then scurry away, back into the hole beneath the floorboards where sometimes, if her father had earned some of the hard cracker bread or a neighbor took pity, she would slip a crumb down so that the mouse might have more than stone soup for its dinner, too. When Marie waked she thought for a moment she might be back in her old house, or maybe in the dark of the orchard; it was very dark here. She felt sore beneath the soft blankets, and hungry, and then her eyes cleared and she saw the woman sitting next to her, in the wooden chair, at the wooden table, looking at her as sometimes her own mother looked at her while she slept.
    Good morning, the woman said.
    Good morning, Marie said, surprised by her own voice.
    You speak, the woman said.
    Yes, she said.
    I am Colette.
    Marie.
    Marie, Colette said.
    Somewhere beyond them the sound of water, a faucet turned on and then off. Maybe shuffling.
    It is Sunday today and we’ll have no customers, Colette said.
    She did not understand Colette, and she did not understand where she was but it was warm beneath the blanket. Her eyes saw through the dark like a cat, saw the grain sacks like the ones her father had for the horses over the windows and the wooden table and the wooden chairs and saw, in the corner, the tripod though she did not know the name. She remembered how once she went with Mother and Ernest to the place where Rose and Sylvie sat for the man who took their pictures. This must be that kind of place.
    This is his studio. We don’t live here, Colette says. People come and sit. Even now. Last week Coco Pellet. You