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F ICT ION
Like Family By Michele Feeney This is the first section of a novel completed during my time at Bennington.
The morning after Cecilia’s last day of school in June 1918, after Papa and Hugh left for the fields and they’d cleared breakfast, Mamusia took the picture of Josef, Cecilia’s oldest brother, off the mantel and put it on the kitchen table. Then she climbed onto the stool and removed the flour sack from behind the heavy pots on the highest pantry shelf and placed the sack on the table next to the picture. Cecilia knew the flour sack did not hold flour. Instead, the sack, weighted with a few rocks from the stream that ran behind the house and bulked up with dried-out corn husks, was where Mamusia kept private things — hair ribbons for Cecilia to wear at school, a savings passbook Mamusia took to the bank from time to time, a packet of sunflower seeds like those they’d planted early last spring. The sunflower plants had grown tall among the stalks of sweet corn in the garden. “Foolishness,” Papa had said, when he noticed the bright blossoms nodding among the corn stalks. “A waste of
