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felt to see her own works published. Seläntö had smiled sweetly at her and whispered, “You know what? It makes you understand why a dog eats its own vomit.”
    Ella stared at her story and remembered the essays waiting in her bag. She’d set herself a strict schedule. She was supposed to have graded a third of the papers today, fifteen altogether, to keep the backlog from growing as new essays came in every couple of days.
    She decided to leave them in her bag for now. No one expected a substitute language and literature teacher to grade papers every single night of her life, did they? It was a heretical thought, but it made her smile. In her mind, she gave the finger to all the powers of the universe that were trying to make her feel guilty about the uncorrected essays.

    That was the day Ella saw Ingrid Katz, who told her an important piece of news.
    But she was so preoccupied with the vestiges of Paavo Emil Milana that were still in her father, and a mother whose husband was rapidly becoming a stranger to her, that all she had to say at the time was “Oh, you don’t say”.

    Paavo Emil Milana spent four more days in the hospital. Then they brought him home.
    Ella drove the Triumph, her father sat beside her and her mother was in the back seat. It felt strange. Her natural place in this car with these people was in the back on the right, where she could see the scar on her father’s cheek.
    She had asked him the same question almost every time they rode in the car. “Dad, where did you get that scar?”
    Her father rarely told bedtime stories or stories of any kind. Made-up stories weren’t his thing. Ella couldn’t remember ever seeing him read a novel. But every time she asked him this question, he gave her a different answer.
    A drunken sailor tried to stab me in the throat and I dodged his knife and got cut on the cheek,
he said once.
I fell out of a tree as a boy when I was trying to climb up to a magpie’s nest and a limb tore a scratch in my cheek,
he said the next time.
    Another time she asked, the answer was
I was cutting across a meadow with my aunt when I was little and there was an angry bull in the field. It almost caught us, and when we jumped over the fence, it just barely scraped my cheek with its horn
.
    One of the answers he gave made Ella’s mother scream.
You see, Ella, I once bought your mother a kitchen knife as a birthday present, and she had wanted a nightgown, and your mother was so upset that she took a swipe at me with the present I’d given her, and she would’ve killed me if I hadn’t escaped to the bathroom
.
    Ella didn’t remember much about her childhood, but she remembered the smell of the inside of the Triumph. It gave her a headache, but she loved it. Sometimes she thought that if she could just sit in that car long enough she would get all her old memories back.
    The car didn’t belong to her father anymore, although the name on the registration was still Paavo Emil Milana. He wouldhave been shocked at the state of the car. Before he got sick he worked on the car every week—checked everything out, cleaned the motor, washed it and rubbed it with Turtle Wax. One time when he was waxing the car he declared, “Show me a man who doesn’t take care of his car, and I’ll show you a man who’s lost his soul.”
    Since she’d returned to Rabbit Back, Ella had occasionally driven the Triumph to work, but she preferred to ride her bicycle if the weather permitted.

    When she left the house to pedal to the school, the first two kilometres were slightly downhill. The breeze was sweetly cool against her skin in the warm air of August. It was wonderful just to sit on her bicycle seat and let her speed build up by itself.
    There were old wooden houses along the dirt road and gardens with their scrubby old apple trees and stone guardians, and here and there newer brick buildings. Along the way she could also get a glimpse of two old playgrounds, a tiny beauty parlour, the beach,