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Show Moon - 77 Joy was twelve years old, and was the best she'd ever been in her body. She could outrun even the boys her age. She taught herself to high jump, having heard of the scissors technique. She did walkovers, chest rolls, one handed cartwheels, handstands. Caleb and Lee were too quiet, too often indoors, so she took them in hand. She wheeled Lee in his stroller at a run until he screamed in delight, carried him on her shoulders and leaped and whinnied like a horse. She swung Caleb around by his feet and hands, tossed him in laughing heaps on the lawn. She taught him somersaults, leapfrogging, hedge-jumping swing-pumping, teeter-totter bouncing, rolled down hills with them, tangled in their sweet small limbs. She could hardly bear how much she loved them. Her art was getting better. She'd begun to use bold, almost abstract sweeps of color, which she combined with meticulously inked detail for the trunk of a tree, a bird, a scattering of leaves. She was intoxicated with the incredible possibilities of color and ink, of own body and her own mind. But that was during the early years in Germany. She began to see the wider world around her. In the city's heart, not far from where they lived, great gaps in the buildings indecently revealed stairwells, plumbing, rooms where people had eaten dinner, had babies, and now there was nothing left but mounds of ruined brick, twisted metal, dust. The man called Hitler had been stopped. To see Germany then was to see the person you're afraid you really are. Gangs of preadolescent American boys carried sticks and roamed the American housing project, shouting, "We're coming for the Krauts." Someone scrawled a swastika on the German teacher's blackboard at the American school, |