Iota

Zuzanah slammed the door after her mother insisted, probably for prophylactic reasons, that she take all eight of her siblings with her. She’d never meet up with Petr, what with the boys and the twins and that baby strapped to her chest like a tick. But it didn’t matter. They’d trudged three miles in the rain to catch a bus that never came. And by now the bread was gone, consumed. The nine stood in a descending row like crestfallen matryoshkas. And all of them were empty, except for the littlest, whose heart was so big it filled him up.