Sleepless. Part 41

It is shocking to be so infinitely wrong. To discover that the point of your existence is not your death, but someone else's life. At the foot of your crib, your mother's body resting inside, I'd taken one more step back and seen that the wall on which I'd been creating my masterpiece did not stand alone; there was another that braced it, its pattern yet to be started.

Everything that I can remember of myself in this story about your mother and father is blurred by the gravity of that moment. Time bent around the ma.s.s of you when I realized that I would not leave you with Chizu, that I could not complete my work until I had ensured that you would be able to start your own. And I cannot say any longer if the person I have described here is me as I truly was, the killer of men and women and children, or a warped reflection of that man, his true brutality obscured by a lens of distortion.

A native speaker of your parents' language, and a deft student of my own, you will have to decide if I have bared all or, as warned against by your grandfather, exposed myself through lies.

For Omaha, the story you ask most often to hear,written in my own hand,JasperGra.s.s Valley, November 13, 2022