By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Two sisters are held in a moment of age difference, bodily feeling, and emotional limit, with the older one finally reaching exhaustion.
The page is quiet but tense. Mist, heart, glaze, and the parenthetical ages make the scene feel both clinical and intimate, as if adolescence and burden are being measured against each other in one fixed instant.
Direct continuation of page 038: the younger hears only `mist creaking`; the older, at seventeen, holds her baby's heartbeat and finds `she had had enough`. The ages — fourteen and seventeen — are stated plainly.