Shorter Days Read Online Free

eruptions of giggles sound shrill.
    Lisa turns to Leonie: “Mama, what are they supposed to be, skeletons or monsters?”
    Her small face is covered with chalk-white powder and her lips gleam dark red. Blue eyes sit like glass marbles under black eyebrows. She had wanted to do her own makeup, and she coated the hairs so thickly with grease pencil that they stand straight up, like bristles. Her hands clasp the play-broom. A tulle skirt with embroidered flowers billows over her dirty winter boots. A rhinestone tiara from last year’s Mardi Gras party sits atop the headscarf which Leonie, after much discussion, was made to knot at the back of Lisa’s neck, rather than under her chin: “I want to be a witch, but a pretty one!” She’ll be starting school next fall—it’s unbelievable.
    Lisa watches the tussling boys circling around each other, all of them seven or eight years older than her. Leonie is sure she’ll pick up one or another of the words she hears the boys use—“expressions,” as they call them in the kindergarten. Two-year-old Felicia crouches at Leonie’s feet. She gathers pebbles from the sidewalk, inspects them briefly, then flings them away with a whoop. She pays no attention to the swarm of monsters. Her hand-me-down anorak is too loose, and it makes her look fat and greasy—a troll-baby with a red nose and green freckles. “Lisstick too!” she demanded emphatically in the bathroom as Leonie was drawing on Lisa’s witch-mouth. Now her moist lips shine as if freshly painted. Her little tongue creeps out to taste the gummy-bear-flavored lip gloss.
    â€œCome on, Mama—let’s go to the bonfire!” Lisa tugs at Leonie’s coat. Leonie walks carefully, her high heels digging into the wet clay. Hard olive-brown pellets left by the sheep are strewn everywhere. It’s rained a lot in the past few days. Patches of mist crept over the ground at the Wren House children’s farm, wrapping all the way up the trees, and the sheep and chickens loom out of it like bleating and cackling ghosts.
    Today the sun is shining again, but the afternoon is chilly despite the blue sky. Leaves spin ceaselessly down from the treetops, gleaming yellow, dark red, and brownish, like worn leather. The hillside is vast and overgrown with bushes and plants that Leonie doesn’t recognize. Leonie saw a rhubarb plant for the first time in the garden of Wren House, which is carefully fenced off to protect it from hungry animals. Leonie wouldn’t survive one day in the great outdoors, even though she grew up in a green-covered row house in Feuerbach. Crooked sandstone steps and narrow trails cut through the vegetation and lead to hand-made huts, a wooden wigwam, the stables. A jungle gym with a slide stands in a sandy hollow that’s edged with boulders. This land belongs to the church: in the seventies they built a flat-roofed building with large rooms, colorful linoleum floors, and spartan furniture where the neighborhood children now meet under the watchful eyes of nursery-school teachers and young men doing their civilian service. Since moving here in the summer, barely a day has gone by that Leonie and her girls haven’t turned up at Wren House. Lisa and Felicia love to pet the sheep, whose dirty wool feels “kind of like greasy hair,” and they make sure that Leonie keeps lettuce and other kitchen scraps to feed to the rabbits. Lisa’s head has been full of the Halloween party for days. Leonie had to read her the card with the grinning pumpkin that’s stuck on the refrigerator over and over: “We’re having a Halloween party. Come in your spookiest clothes and join us for ghost stories, a haunted house, and a relay race!” No one seems to mind that the eve of All Saint’s Day is still a week away. “The kids like Halloween better than Mardi Gras. Too many people are away on the actual day, so we moved it