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sabrina.uswak

sabrina.uswak

Next they’ll ask me about my sister. About how one Tuesday someone saw her running for the train that was coming and how she wouldn’t turn back wouldn’t check to see who was looking but people saw, especially Sister Marta as she keeps proving to me with her glittering stare, who always takes pain to keep dust from browning the white trim of her habit and other women raise their noses to call it vanity because they’ve been darning the same socks for years now and nothing can fix them into new pairs Mary Mother of God. But I don’t have anything for them, I don’t have the knife I don’t have the gun powder I don’t have the rage. I can see it in their faces that that’s what they want they want me to have—the bruises hidden under my dress, the sob in my throat. But I only have my job at the feed store and the farmer’s son that sometimes puts his three-finger hand on my breast if no one is looking and I don’t tell him to stop because I think I told him to do that without telling him and every time is the first time his curly head bowed in apology prayer surprise shame—

“Ma’am? You need to answer the question. Were you there that night?”

As if there was only one night where something happened that would later be important, that I should pay special attention to and let it settle on my face to give more lines to prove it really happened—as if I haven’t got enough calluses in my hands to show for my work—my proof that I’ve been here all along while my sister left and father left and mother never—that I listened to every train howl through blood-orange nights, hearing the drifters’ boots thump like stones but waited and waited and waited for the silent feet of my sister.


Sabrina Uswak has a penchant for collecting degrees and books which led her to live in fun (rainy) places such as Halifax, Edinburgh, and Oxford. Currently, she works as a content specialist in Calgary.

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