This YouTube video is a reading of an excerpt from In the Context of Love .

Second-person Narrative

Angelica talks to (the absent) Joe, recalling the time they drove down Route 21 past the steel mills and factories into downtown Cleveland. The time setting is in the mid-seventies.

If that man were you…

“Cuyahoga Iron Works, Republic Steel, and Cleveland Steel & Tubes pumped the blackest, most foul-smelling smoke into the sky, but the open-hearth furnaces fascinated me. Flaming tongues rose from orange mouths that could have swallowed men’s lives whole. I imagined the steelworkers’ eyebrows and lashes were singed, their every pore packed with dirt. What would it be like to be married to a man who coughed smoke into his wife’s and children’s faces at night, who left soot on his pillow in the morning? When he left for work, a dark smudge where he had slept would remind me that he defied death every day. I told myself if that man were you, I would love you even more.”

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Linda K. Sienkiewicz is the author of In the Context of Love, adult contemporary fiction, a 2016 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist.

Angelica Schirrick had always suspected there was something deeply disturbing about her family, but the truth was more than she bargained for.