The Core of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

your pudgy little hand and pushed it into the arms of the baby doll and said happily that the baby liked the kitty. I was entranced with the fire truck, and I couldn’t help running over to it first and picking it up to look at it. Then I noticed the social workers’ response: as if a whiff of tar or smoke had drifted in on the air, like a distant forest fire somewhere off in the woods.
    Something wasn’t right.
    I let go of the fire truck and it fell to the floor with a thud. I even kicked it a little, as if I’d just realized that, in spite of its bright color, it was a cold, dull thing. The smoky smell cleared up immediately and started to change into something more like the smell of a warming sauna, pine soap and dried birch whisks. I noticed that the nice smell they were exuding grew stronger and lingered when I rejected the tools and trucks and put on the apron and picked up the ladle. I built a circle of letter blocks and threw the little plastic bricks in the middle and mixed them around with the ladle and said I was making oatmeal. I scooped up a ladleful of bricks and offered them to the doll you were holding and told her to be good and eat her porridge.
    I saw how one social worker looked at the other one and there was a hint of metal in the air. One of them gathered up all the dolls and stuffed toys—you protested so loudly!—and left the fire truck and the wooden wrench and the bricks and the conductor’s hat.
    You immediately knew what to do. You were a little copycat, and you put the bricks in the conductor’s hat with your chubby hands and started mixing them with the wrench. I was left with the fire truck. It had a folding ladder and real wheels that rolled. I picked it up again.
    Grandma Aulikki took a little breath and I could smell something faint, sharp like lemon juice. The social workers’ eyes were cold, waiting.
    Then I knew what to do.
    I pulled the fire truck to my breast and rocked it. I said, “Aa-aa.”
    I saw the looks on the social workers’ faces and my grandmother’s face, and there were two completely different kinds of smells in the air: a sweet, almost overripe smell around the social workers, and a smell from my grandmother like the freshness of laundry dried in the sun.
    That was the first time I heard someone use the word “femiwoman.” The other social worker used the word “eloi,” but they were both talking about us.
    The social workers didn’t give us another glance as they wrote on their papers. They told Aulikki that we would need new names, and that for simplicity’s sake they would use the same first letters. I’m sure you don’t even remember that you were once Mira and I was Vera. After that we were Manna and Vanna.
    The new smell around our grandmother got stronger, like the cleaning fluid you use to scrub the bathroom, but she nodded and smiled and murmured her agreement that the names suited us perfectly.
    The social workers gathered up the toys and I was tense, wonder­ing if they would remember the little tin train engine, which had rolled out of sight under the table. They did, and I was terribly disappointed, so disappointed that I was afraid they would notice the dark, earthy smell coming from me.
    After that Aulikki called us Vanna and Manna. That same day I named your dolls Vera and Mira, to at least keep our real names that way.
    Aulikki didn’t care in the least about how she was supposed to raise elois, but I realized that only much later. When I turned seven and was supposed to go to school, she asked for permission to homeschool me. It was a long way from Neulapää to the nearest school, she didn’t have a car, and the state school transport would have been an extra expense to society because there were no other houses in the area with school-age children. So she had no trouble getting permission.
    Just before the education inspectors came to Neulapää, Aulikki