The space in between (2026)

There is a fact. In the last part of the Greek Civil War the communist party called its women to fight, and forty thousand children were left behind, under the air raids, without food. One army gathered them into the Queen's orphanages; the other took them north over the border. Some went willingly. Some were carried out of their houses.

There is a rumour. That a year later, short of soldiers, the communist army took those same children back, choosing them by height rather than by age, and that a column of a hundred and thirty was ambushed on the road to Thessaly and left with no one alive.

One of them is writing to the mother he never met. He assembles her as he walks: eyes dark as coal, then blue; hair long and dark; a voice like thunder when she was angry. Memories that cannot be his. He is not afraid of the road. Home and death have become the same place, and it is the only place where he will see her face.