Prologue

When I was a small child, before the war, my father and I would go out to the far edge of town and star gaze. I remember my father would pull me close and point up at the dark night sky, telling stories of Hercules, the warrior, and Cassiopeia, the vain. I would listen as his breath puffed in the cool night air, and his soft, deep voice painted tales that he told as though they were a movie playing in front of my eyes. I remember how his strong arms would look as they pointed to one star after the other. Showing me how they connected to form the bodies of figures in the atmosphere. My mother had always told me that my father was a dreamer. Being only the age of ten, I didn’t have a good notion as to what she meant. I’d always seen him as a molder of words, a master of the craft of imagery.

To me, he had been a gentle giant. Adam Kaczmarek stood about six foot three. His shoulders were broad and his shirt covered the muscles that made ripples in his skin when he moved, muscles that were carved from shoveling coal. As a little girl I would trace the veins that showed on his arms. My mother would laugh and say that for such a big man, he never was too intimidating.

At night, when he came home his dark brown hair would stick to his forehead. I remember my mother pushing it out of his eyes with her tiny fingers. He’d never cut his hair as short as the other men I’d seen, insisting that his longer hair made him feel like a spry young boy again. On these remarks, he’d look at my mother and cast a wink her way, to which she would reply with an eye-roll.

My mother was a pretty woman. She had a small, dancers frame and long blonde hair that went down to her waist. Her hair framed her angular face and sharp green eyes that always turned soft when she saw either my father or I. Being as tiny as she was, I had always found it funny that whenever my father went to give her a hug, it looked like he was swallowing her in his arms. My mother, outside our small home, was normally a quiet woman. She taught Kindergarten and loved stories as much as my father did. The only drawback to this is that she was never very good at telling them. She always ended up telling her small students the stories my father told me. The only story she was ever good at telling was the one about her my father and her met. This was a story that, for once, my father wasn’t very good at telling, but my mother knew every detail down to the color of the tie my father was wearing.