Sandra Kolankiewicz

Sandra Kolankiewicz's fiction and poetry has appeared widely. "The Brother" is from Aftermath, a hybrid novel/short story collection of eleven first person different narratives, each character discussing the same topic: the death of a young husband and father in a house fire. She is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Even the Cracks. Her novel Blue Eyes Don't Cry won the Hackney Award for the Novel.

Aftermath

The Brother
People have commented how stoic I was about my brother’s death, how graceful all the sons were about losing the third in line, but most of them don’t realize we were born with genes for fatalism that had been switched on for generations. On both sides of my family before the emigration here, our ancestors knew little but stress, war, and hard work.
Return to Author Index