Page 112 - Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

HANNAH WOKE TO A STRANGE MECHANICAL BELLOWING.
For a moment, she thought it was the clock radio by
her bed. She sat up suddenly and hit her head with a
loud crack on the shelf above her. Stunned, shelooked
around. Clock radio? The words sat lumpily in her mind.
She was not sure what a clock radio was. Besides, her
head hurt where she'd banged it and her back ached
from lying on the hard shelf. Even her leg hurt. She
drew her knee up to look. There was caked blood and
a big scab along her shin.
Then she remembered: the trip in the cattle car, the
long hungry days, the heat and the cold, the smell, the
dead baby, the tattoo, the shorn hair. Cautiously she
reached up and felt her head. What hair was left was
a stubble. She did not dare look at the number on her
arm.
Swinging her legs carefully over the side of the shelf,
she eased herself onto the floor, aware that the bellow-

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