the last book I ever read (What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché, excerpt eight)

from What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché:

All that day we went place together—to the empty gray cathedral without pews, flocks of dover flying in the clerestory; to the human rights office, with its red-and-gray-tiled floor, folding chairs and blue walls, where she showed me photograph albums, one with daisies on the cover, where the photos of the desaparecidos were mounted on sticky pages covered with plastic. Most of the photographs of the desaparecidos had been taken at school or on some occasions, such as completion of nurses’ training, a quinceañera birthday party, a dinner in celebration of a betrothal. Therefore, most of the photographs were of young people, even if, at the time they disappeared, some were no longer so young.