already in the slow decaying orbit of menopause.

Well to begin by agreeing on something, I will tell you what pisses me off: that they avoided making the race issue central (in my opinion) *during the campaign* but the second he was elected, they felt they could start hammering away on the issue as if it were the sole purpose of the election - at least on the BBC. THAT I do find cheap.

Once more I reiterate, I don't think many people *were* voting based on race - but I have to say, I still think that even if they were, they'd be quite entitled. Are the sins visited on the next generation? Well, if you take an individualistic perspective, looking at particular mums and dads and particular kiddywinks, it seems a silly idea - why should I feel a legacy of guilt about the genocide of Australian aborigines - I wasn't there!, right? But there is the fact that in nation-building in Australia and United States, the oppression of subordinate races was an enabling condition, and the vested interest of the dominant culture in legitimating its power structures and its very status quo leads to a perpetuation of that dominance and oppression which is as visible in the US in relation to so-called 'African Americans' almost as in Johannesburg. Just a generation ago, Welly, these people could not vote. Can't you see how history - a history of generations being denied the very liberty and political equality for which the US has always so ostentatiously celebrated itself - their exclusion from those rights occurring not just legally, formally, but at ground level through everyday people's attitudes - including people of McCain's generation - might be entitled to find it inspiring, as a symbol, that identifying with the historically-abused, dehumanised demographic minority had made it into the "biggest, whitest house in the country"? Culture doesn't die with each generation - we're born into it, inherit the structures past generations developed, put in place - and we benefit from them - or suffer by them, depending. So yes - the sins can be visited to some extent. In my opinion : )

I DO however see where you're coming from -like, I understand the spirit in which you're saying what you're saying. So yeah : ) But as I study William Faulkner and Herman Melville, I'm kind of permanently immersed in centuries of American cultural panic over race - over how to make black people seem a little less than human - make them something that is "not us - not American" - and so the symbol is inevitably amazing, to me. Personal view : ) But happy to differ. Thanks for taking time to respond. Oh, and Danes are racists. It's because they're closer to monkeys than us. So don't let them lead you astray.

Threadbare from multiple washes, her leggings were getting see-through, but she owned no full-length mirror, so she didn't realise, and she didn't notice people looking in the supermarket because she was too busy squeezing the underripe plums.

*

In a sense she didn't feel like her mother was dead and gone, because when she looked in the mirror she could see her mother's face in her own face, but at the same time, it only seemed to confirm the loss, for it was her mother's dying face that she saw in her face.

It is only when she's at the table, leaning forward on her elbows, wrists cocked and getting sore now as she peels the sixth stiff potato, that she senses the beginning.

It is slow, but entire, and it will not be slow for long - it will come all at once, any moment. But slow at first - the slow and silent stormtrooping of the pall across her body, down her corridors, into her core, that stormtrooping of slow snow, filmic but without soundtrack, a dense spread, a dead wet billowing, and one second more and it has taken hold completely, surrounding, swamping. She is suddenly caught inside it, a big white puffy astronaut suit suffocating her, but without which she knows she could not breathe, and already she cannot breathe.

Her heart. Her heart. She lets out a little laugh, gasless, barely a gasp, and under it her heart begins its throbbed drumming, hard and neither cold nor warm, only sad, with that sad lukewarm character of sadness, that dense infertile weight. She seems to feel the red cells run her bloodstream like lost bees, travelling from weighted bloom to weighted bloom without finding pollen, dragging their unpollinated bodies through a thick molecular air, but it's only her blood, that blackish lightless liquid, its insipid trickling running the same course of terrible sadness to which there is never an answer.

Not a question, sadness. No shape to it, no phrasing. For a long time, now, she will not move - not unless the telephone rings, in which case, she will start her screaming.

There was a kind of snow that only fell on warm, grey days—on days without air, where space was never quite space and light was not light. A pecking, specking snow inside that could neither melt nor evaporate, because it was never really frozen - it wasn't even cold. It came in slow determined billows in flakes like washing powder, flakes like chips of marble, white phosphorus, or napalm. But it didn't burn her. Its textured absence had no taste.

The thlupping bubbles of hard-boiling water rail at the saucepan's brim. and she reaches for the heat knot to adjust it down. She hears the tightening sigh of the gas withdrawing its breath. Its light blue burn beneath the saucepan looks somehow imagined.

A few minutes later, she is straining the seven potatoes, seeking the peeler. She glances at her wristwatch, her grandmother's wristwatch, and sees the digital time, and knows there are probably only a few minutes to go now, and it isn't so much that the drumming is louder, or even nearer, but just that she has pricked to it. She has begun to wait.

Always, the kids at school, would wonder aloud how they would meet their ends. Some imagined murders. Most predicted cancer or heart attack because it required little imagination; it agreed with statistics and their own family records. She herself predicted cancer. No one said suicide and no one at all said revolution, military upheaval. They were seven, six, eight years old. Death was grandparental.

Sick of waiting. She looks again at her watch. It has got to the point where she wishes the doors would hiss open, let the sadness rush in. It occurs to her, though not as a realistic possibility, that it might not come today. It is late, although it has been later before, and still arrived. It is delayed. Trains may delay. Signals fail, and are serviced, and corrected. It is not timed like clockwork. Not exactly.

No it didn't belong to her, it knew so little about her, she knew nothing about it, she did not belong to it; they were like two persons sitting awkwardly together in a rail carriage for a while, that was all, knowing it was only for a time, not long enough to bother exchanging more than a quick glance, and eventually one of them would get up and depart, and it was always the sadness that departed, leaving her rattling on, and it seemed perfectly natural that it was the sadness that should go first, that she herself never departed. She stayed by herself in the carriage, alone, saw other passengers come and go, until the train would complete its circuit of the track and pass back through the same station, at the same time, and the terrible sadness would come.

Sometimes she would find herself on her knees, on the carpet, with her knees scratched up, white bloodless knuckled clutched hard on her thighs, with her lower lip sucked back hard between her teeth, groaning like a nun in immaculate labour.

Enora waited for the hour when the terrible sadness would come. She knew it would come, knew when it would come, and even now she could feel it drumming up, with the slow caution of water towards a spill. And she knew it wasn't really hers, the sadness - that was the funniest thing, how it would rise and descend (both) out of nowhere, coming over her, up from under her, a cold electric blanket, failing either to stifle or surprise her.