Jim waits for three days alone in the house for his mother and father to return. He passes the time by plane spotting. Jim plays on the lawn, no longer neatly trimmed, and pretends he is one of the Japanese marines who attacked the Wake. The rest of the time he spends in his mother's bedroom remembering the long hours they spent together doing his Latin homework and listening to stories from her childhood in England (a country he has not experienced). He can still see his mother's footprints in the talc and imagines a warped fantasy that they represent the movements of his mother teaching the Japanese soldiers the tango or some other dance. Jim tries out the footprints himself and decides they are far too violent a tango than.....
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