She accepts with chilling matter-of-factness that her son's life will be plagued by drugs and tussles with the law.
China's ambassador in Delhi chilled matters this week, declaring Arunachal Pradesh, a state covering some 84,000 square kilometres (33,000 square miles) in the north-east of India, to be part of China.
It possesses the chilling, matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers Projectt in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison's "Beloved," Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables and Ralph Ellisonn's "Invisible Man," and with brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift.
They're also really chill, no matter what happens.
His crimes are chilling: no matter what he says, his words get taken literally, as commands, compelling innocent people to stab themselves or to abandon their children, shove their arms into whirring blenders or never, ever blink.
No matter how chill I was, there were always new things popping up for me to be even more chill about.
The first officer walks up to the driver's side window with caution, but when there's no apparent conflict, the other officers holster their weapons and seem to chill out in a matter of seconds.
The poem recreates that chill with the parched matter-of-factness of its conclusion, beyond which life seems, at least momentarily, unimaginable.
However, the contracts do serve to intimidate and chill speech about public matters ― essentially how the government runs.
A story in the state-run newspaper China Daily was chilling in its matter-of-fact accounting of the incident in May 2002: One baby died of suffocation.
