Dor

There is a sound the gate makes.

Ioana can produce it in her head exactly — the specific complaint of that specific hinge, in cold, at about seven in the morning, when her grandmother went out to the birds. She has never found it anywhere else. She has, at various points over eleven years in Milan, listened for it in car parks and stairwells and once, absurdly, in a hardware shop.

That is where it lives. Not in the village. In a hinge.

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She left at twenty-two, like everybody, and it was not a tragedy and she is tired of being asked about it as though it were.