A Glass Rose

Mumbling the prayers of the Rosary at Stanislaw Machek's wake, his family wondered what happened the night before his youngest daughter Stella ran away to New York City. Only the mother, Rosalja, had been there then, and she sat now, as she had ever since, mindlessly gazing at a bowl of glass flowers in her lap—a story as intense and universal as a Greek Tragedy or the Stations of the Cross.