It was only when the coroner withdrew the sliver of paper knife from its
whiteness, that, coagulated, the dead and waiting blood began to ooze.
* * * * *
"Do you," intoned the judge for the third and slightly more impatient
time, "plead guilty or not guilty to the charge of murder against you?"
This time the lips of the prisoner's wound of a mouth moved stiffly
together:
"Guilty."
ROULETTE
I
Snow in the village of Vodna can have the quality of hot white plush
of enormous nap, so dryly thick it packs into the angles where fences
cross, sealing up the windward sides of houses, rippling in great seas
across open places, flaming in brilliancy against the boles of ever so
occasional trees, and tucking in the houses up to the sills and down
over the eaves.
Out in the wide places it is like a smile on a dead face, this snow
hush, grateful that peace can be so utter. It is the silence of a broody
God, and out of that frozen pause, in a house tucked up to the sills and
down to the eaves, Sara Turkletaub was prematurely taken with the pangs
of childbirth, and in the thin dawn, without even benefit of midwife,
twin sons were born.
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