Helena Clare Pittman

“I really shouldn’t have…” that was the prompt. I hated it. It contradicts my world view, an organic thing I seem to have come into this life with.

My sister’s and my generation seems an aberration of forgetful entitlement next to the people who moved in that golden world, born in the darkness of the Europe they managed to flee...

What had taken my mother over?  What had moved her to reach for me?

The first time I went to the house in the woods myself, I stood on the porch and watched a tree fall. I must have turned my head just in time...

It was as if my sister, who never had children of her own, waited for this child...

Anna Maria Alberghetti, the opera singer, turned up in our bunk on the last day of camp like something out of a dream.

She was an adult in a sea of adults and children who seemed not to notice the world around them or each other. That was my child’s view...

I’d enter the game with all the belief that comes naturally to a theatrically inclined child—it takes a good audience to see the truth of a good actor...

It was the beginning that I would only see in hindsight, backwards in time, after learning again and again that such mercy exists—exists, secretly in concrete streets...

I took Three-Dimensional Design again, three years later. Then, I was older than my classmates, and I knew why I was there...