From the Editor

The thing with your parents is, they keep coming up with stuff you can't make head nor tail of, and then they die and you're left with a lifetime of wondering.

When she entered the country (legally, I might add) there seemed to be little question about whether she would be understood, her mother tongue ostensibly the same as that of her new home. The variations in idiom, intonation, and accent didn't initially seem worth considering. There were enough grammatical agreements that these differences should disappear, the linguistic undulations smoothed over by the inevitable slippage of words.

She had now been in this not-so-new place for a while, and her words were no longer holding up as they had in the past; they demanded attention, refusing to be subjugated to the common discourse. She realized that how things were said mattered; each word was not just a return to the past, but a connection, a relationship that shaped experience. These words were the representatives of an inner world that sometimes stood at odds with the agreed upon words of her recently settled world.

She woke up early. The morning was still. The sun was barely creeping over the horizon, refracted and broken into shards of light by the objects occupying the line of the horizon. The faint scent of jasmine floated through the air. The early-morning air was cold and brisk, enough to draw attention to her exposed fingers and toes, to remind her of time and place, but not entirely consume her awareness to the task of protecting and covering these extremities. She noticed a moth, the one from last night that she had remarked on for its luminous pale green color. The moth had been frantically flying around the ceiling light; what was it looking for? It now appeared unmoving and prostrate, refusing the light of the new day, wings spread apart as if it were now part of a collection, constrained by some imaginary pin.

There were few border crossings in the early conversations, and the