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Excerpt from White on Black by Rubén Gallego

Pirozhki

A children's home, a home for children. A place where children are prepared for their future, their adult life. In addition to general education subjects, in a children's home they teach the basics of survival for the complicated world that begins outside the school gate. The boys are taught to understand wiring, to use a fret-saw and to assemble and repair furniture; the girls learn to sew, knit and cook. It's not so easy, teaching a boy without hands to change electrical plugs, and teaching one-armed girl to knit seems almost impossible. It's hard. Really, it's very hard. Our teachers were able to accomplish things that parents of a disabled child could not even have imagined.

I am lying on the classroom floor. A girl comes in carrying a tray. In place of one leg she has a prosthetic, but by our children's home standards she is practically healthy. On the tray are pirozhki. Hot and golden.

"Where are the boys?" she says "We girls baked pirozhki and they promised to stop by the kitchen and try them."

"They went to the movies."

"What do you mean, the movies?"

"They got taken to the movies today. Tomorrow, they will take you. You see, you have cooking class."

"But why didn't they tell us? What are we supposed to do with the pirozhki now?"

She puts the tray on the teacher's desk, sits down on the bench, takes a pirozhok from the tray and hands it to me.

A pirozhok with potatoes and onion. I am eating a pirozhok.

"It's delicious," I say "Your pirozhki came out fine."

The girl doesn't hear me. She is staring off into space.

"That's odd. Where are the boys?"