Whisper
Chris Struyk-Bonn
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1459804759
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Sixteen-year-old Whisper, who has a cleft palate, lives in an encampment with three other young rejects and their caregiver, Nathanael. They are outcasts from a society (in the not-too-distant future) that kills or abandons anyone with a physical or mental disability. Whisper’s mother visits once a year. When she dies, she leaves Whisper a violin, which Nathanael teaches her to play. Whisper’s father comes to claim her, and she becomes his house slave, her disfigurement hidden by a black veil. But when she proves rebellious, she is taken to the city to live with other rejects at a house called Purgatory Palace, where she has to make difficult decisions for herself and for her vulnerable friends.
possible in filthy water that smelled of chemicals and latrines. I didn’t mind washing the clothes, scrubbing them rhythmically while the sun shone on my back and the soft shush of grasses hummed beside me. There was beauty here, if I could ignore the smell of the water. The same woman as before worked closest to me, the woman with the two little ones. I listened to the chatter of her oldest child, a toddler who busily ran about the bank of the creek, and suddenly I missed Eva with a pain as big
create a different note by applying pressure to the strings. I moved the bow with my right hand and changed the positioning of my left-hand fingers. I could do this. It was tricky, but I could do it. My fingers fluttered over the strings, pushed here, pushed there. At first a nasal twang screeched from the instrument, but if I pulled the bow just so and held it down, a sweetness rolled from the strings, and I could feel the music pouring out of me. I smiled at Nathanael. “Yes,” he said and
never survive. Go back to the camp, go live in the woods, hide with the others. Stay good, stay pure.” Her voice was so low and biting, it chafed like the brittle snow that cuts in the winter. “Who is the father?” I asked. She turned away from me, her feet already pointed in the opposite direction, her black-lined eyes watching the trodden sidewalk. “Just wait. You’ll do the same thing I did. They’ll start following you, telling you how beautiful your body is, how sexy you look, and you’ll
the slits in her face. My hands were filthy from the edges of the bucket, but there was nowhere to wash. Every inch of this place felt unclean, from the hard-packed dirt floors to the benches covered with a sticky residue to the bars that looked slick with sweat. I stood in the middle of the cell, wondering how to avoid touching anything. A month I would be here, thirty days, and I could not stand in the middle of the cell for that length of time without touching something. I took a bowl of
laughing, entered the building. Jeremia shifted his weight to the left, to the right. I pushed the door to my dorm room open and hoped that he would rush inside rather than out into the shadows, an elusive deer that I would again lose. He looked at the people in the hallway and then slipped into the dorm room. I stepped in after him, still holding Eva against me, and shut the door behind us, cocooning us together once again. I had not felt arms around my neck or the warmth of a body against mine