Dante's Fire

Chapter Twenty Six: Andre

ANDRE

Andre dreamt that he was at the orphanage, that he was a boy again, starved, gaunt in face, still small.

He dreamt that he was at the overseer's office, that he was standing as still as a statue, as most children were wont to do in the woman's presence. You stood before her and felt immediately like a criminal. It might have been her eyes, those hazel suns. They had an accusing way about them. It might have been the aura in the orphanage. A forbidding, gloomy aura that cast shadows over every thing and every child. It was a wonder that people were often surprised that adopted kids almost never turned out all right.

It was just as he remembered it, that office. Even in his dreams, his memory of the place was hauntingly perfect. Poorly lit and cramped, it was filled up to bursting with shelves thick with files. These files were stuffed with papers browned at their edges. Identification passports littered the ground. Names, dates of birth, places of origin filled the pa