The Hollow Cost

My mother told me about the hollow cost one Saturday morning as I lay in her bed beside her where I read comic books while she moaned for just forty more winks, it her day off from the Payless Cafe, and when she finally yawned, stretched and woke, after I’d turned the Little Lulu pages as loudly as I could, sometimes she told me stories about when she was a little girl in Texas riding horses, milking cows, cooking on a wood-burning stove. But that morning she cleared her throat the way she always did before she scolded me, and she told me she had something to tell me that I should hear first from my mother hunger gas showers shaven-headed women sixty-pound men human-skin lampshades the war so much more than orange oleo F.D.R. speeches on the radio letters from my father in Algeria. Oh, how you wish you had never heard some of the things your mother told you that six million were more than all the stars in the sky on a clear, winter night.