I KICK THE JAMMED door open. I alight from the train. Tunnel vision. I can’t see anything to either side. I cross the railway tracks. I enter the yard. ‘Well, you said you’d come!’ I cross the threshold. The chill from the kitchen hits me. The fire in stove is out. The floors are unswept. I don’t venture to look at mother. Only now does she lift her eyes. She’s sitting up in bed, wrapped in a quilt, leaning on a pillow propped against the wall, her white hair poking from under her black headscarf, her face drawn. She is swaddled in my short camouflage jacket, the one with the unravelling sleeves, from which extrudes a kind of mouldy cotton wool lining. She is nibbling one of those cheap, crumbly biscuits they sell loose by the kilo. Like before the revolution...

• Radacina de bucsau / And Juniper Roots for Their Meat

• O. Nimigean