THE BURNING CHILD
The sky beyond the great curtainless widowpane was still entirely black, and yet it was morning already. This is the moment that the clock of night winds down to zero, and that of the day begins at one. Kateřina was able to imagine it. With her inner eye she saw the line of numbers, as if they were written on a blackboard in chalk, but there is no chalk, there is no blackboard. The digits hang in the air, there, where there is no air at all.
“Where are those numbers?” she had asked, when she was much smaller, and her parents drew them on the dust of the path with a stick.
“See: one and one makes two, and two and one make three, and three and one make four, and four and one make five,” said Daddy, crossing through the row of vertical lines with a horizontal one. All she
