Standing a safe distance away, alert to any sudden moves, I listened as she proceeded to tell me the most unbelievable story. She had grown up in a shack between two scrapyards in a faraway land where she claimed, “Man-sized rodents walked out from the deserts on two legs.” When she was thirteen and rummaging through the scrapyard for metal, her mother revealed that her biological father was not the grizzled man who was shovelling some distance away, but someone who had disappeared years ago. Her mother brought out a photograph and she felt that the sun sluicing through the latticed fretwork of an abandoned building made it appear as if the photo’s subject was peering through the bars of a cell. “Where is he now?” she had asked.
Her mother addressed the question half a year later in an ea
