“Don’t ask your cousin Yvonne any questions about le camp de concentration!” admonished Sylvie’s mother, as if forgetting that the child had been mute for months.
Yvonne was waving from the top of the granite stairs of her house in Bourg-Lastic. She was not the human skin stretched into lamp shades that Sylvie had had been forced to watch on les dossiers de l’écran. Yvonne was not like her mother: she kept the birdcage door open so that her turquoise and Wedgewood blue parakeets could sing from a place of freedom, if they wished, and still be loved.
Dominique Margolis was born and raised in a remote French village but emigrated to the USA as an adult. Even though English is not her native language, she studied English at the university and earned a PhD. She taught English and French in France and in the USA and edited student essays for publication in three of the University of Denver’s Guides to First-Year English. She was published in Anna Evans’s Communication Intuitive – Rencontre avec le Monde Animal (ALMP, 2004). Twitter: @dominique_1234.
The Centifictionist 
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