Minutes from Minutes to Midnight

 Songs that get me into Sonja's headspace. (Yeah, Sonja is kinda' a weirdo)

  The child sat alone on the riverbank, the warm bowl in her hands beating back the winter chill. She ate the porridge in slow, methodical bites, savoring the butter and jam her mother had mixed in, and staring across the river at the city. Behind her, the older women assumed they were out of earshot, but still spoke in Estonian, thinking the girl, who’d grown up speaking Russian, could not understand. “Why are you leaving now?” Aunt Delia wasn’t really her aunt. Her mother’s family was from across the border in Russia proper, but Kassikoht was a small community - not much more than a campsite, really; and though it was a stone’s throw from Narva it remained isolated from the city by the river - and by something else; but the girl hadn’t been able to figure out what. Whatever it was, those who decided to live in the camp were basically one large, tightly-knit family. “I don’t have a choice,” her mother was saying. Lying. The girl was only ten. She’d celebrate her eleventh birthday