Marble Thalia Garoufalidis Your mom bends her knees, crouching to sit down on the marble floor. Her sweaty palms against the slick cool floor momentarily relieve her from the intensity of the heat. A thin layer of dirt clings to her hand as she picks up a tall ribbed glass of lukewarm water with no ice; she takes a gulp. Yeti to kryo den einai kala gia to moro. She’s in Greece, it’s July of 1999, and she’s three months pregnant with you. The windows are open for the occasional breeze to blow in and carry the heat away, the soft meows of a cat heard from the back alley. Motorcycles spitting out exhaust and gas fumes putter down the same road, their noises seem to echo off every open window and door. Next summer, when you’re six months old, you’ll return with her and meet Yaya Keti and Papou Babis with his wildly hairy eyebrows and permanently hunched back for the first time.You won’t remember it, only through stories of you crying on the plane and being held up by Baba for your passport picture. The photo will live in the fireproof lockbox hidden in the linen closet at your Mom’s house in Georgia.You may never feel like you’ve grown out of those plump rosy cheeks. You’ll be eight years old and complaining when she tells you her secret to staying cool at Yaya’s home. “When I was pregnant with you, I had to lay down on the floor,” she says. Wondering why you never thought of doing something as intuitive as that, laying down on the marble, you feel like you were cut from that same ancient stone. Feeling your tailbone and your shoulder blades poking out, noticing the curved nature of your spine for the first time against the solid stone. Sprawling your arms and legs out so that no limbs are touching in an attempt to maximize your surface area against the marble.Your fingers trace lines in the floor, moving into divots, and noticing the miniscule cracks where dust collects. They are so small, hardly able to fit the slender edge of your fingernail between them; you rest. The summer after, in third grade for a show and tell assignment, you ask Baba sitting on the soft scratched black leather couch to write down their address. On a pale yellow sticky note 10 Thorikion Athens, Greece reads in his perfectly uniform handwriting. He writes in English the same way he does in Greek. Giving the sticky note to Ms. Sisler, she types in the address and you watch it amplified on the projector. The earth from above, suddenly zooming in we travel fast across vast continents, momentarily settling on Europe, panning jaggedly to Greece. The islands look
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