Smiling faces beam at you from every wall, table top, mantelpiece and shelf in Sylvia’s home. In sepia tones, there’s Nina and Tony, her paternal grandparents, now deceased. Her father, Manny, with seventies hair, buttoned up in his wedding suit, Uncle Nico, his best man, at his side; in yellowed Kodachrome there’s her mother Maria, holding the twins, just infants then; .the twins again as shepherds in the school nativity play and together in their class photographs; brother, Angelo, in his Scout’s uniform and later graduating from university; and sister Dani in fairy fancy dress, wearing her mother’s high heels, and later with her fiancée Johnny atop Mount Buller.
There are no photographs of Sylvia. There is no room in this gallery for a little girl with a cleft lip and palate.
Burnside Writers Group 